In the U.S., we have "couch potatoes." Japan has "couch rice." These sleepy little "onigiri" spend most of their time curled in the fetal position in front of the TV. Many of them are in my English Speech class at the university. Now that it's final exam time, the couch rice must break out of their safe triangle worlds wrapped in seaweed blankets and adopt a vertical position long enough to give a speech.

Most students start their speeches like oscillating fans, standing erect and scanning the audience from side to side while trilling out their introduction, the only part of the speech they memorized. Next is the predictable stop in midoscillation and fixing their eyes on the floor, where they use extraordinary powers to extract English sentences from cracks between the tiles. At first I thought there must be bugs down there holding up cue cards, but no, just cracks with dirt and stray hairs lodged between them. When a student can't recall her speech, she stares at the crack and narrows her eyes. This seems to be enough of a threat to the crack for it to ooze out English words, albeit at an excruciatingly slow rate. If the crack absolutely refuses to ooze, she looks up, cocks her head and listens to the gods. On occasion, this actually works.

Midway through the body of the speech, most students are nearing desperation. They have exhausted the cracks for the basic stuff, so the next strategy is to teeter. These girls, obviously not afraid of heights, get inspiration by leaning back on their spiked heels the way you used to lean back on two legs of the chair at the dinner table when you were a kid. The problem is, as the teacher, I can no longer pay attention to the speech, as I am constantly assessing the angle of the girl's body to her heels, and the likelihood she'll fall off her spikes, requiring me to call the school's twisted ankle squad. Even the ones who aren't in heels tend to list to one side, far enough to make me gasp and imagine tragic newspaper headlines such as, "Girl lists into coma giving English speech."