Every week we will be doing a Teacher Feature Friday where we ask some interesting, “outside the box” questions to teachers we see every day at Shaler Area.

In this premiere edition of Teacher Feature, we talked to Mr. Steven Balsomico, Shaler Area High School’s Japanese teacher.

Q:  Best Concert you’ve ever been to?

A: The best concert that I’ve been to was this traditional Taiko drum concert and it was absolutely wild because they took this traditional instrument and just went nuts with a modern dancing band running around. It was crazy. 

Q: What’s your fattest moment?

A: In Japan they have this type of restaurant called Shabu Shabu, it’s a hot pot where you put slices of meat into a pot of boiling soup and eat it. Usually for about 50 dollars you can get all you can eat for 2 hours so me and my buddy Ray went to one of these places once and in an hour and a half we each ate 2 kilos of beef.  And now that’s 2 kilos of beef on top of that we had assorted amounts of pork, vegetables, and noodles. And I had never eaten so much food in my life. 

Q: Favorite student slang? Use it in a sentence.

A: So this is a weird one, I don’t know exactly if it’s appropriate, but we’re gonna go with it anyway because a student introduced this to me a couple of years ago. He said to hit someone with “a poop sock”, now I’m not entirely sure what that is but something to the effect of “A poop sock is a great weapon because it gives physical and poison damage”. Now I wouldn’t go too much more into that, but that’s a fascinating piece of slang.

Q: Craziest Place You’ve been to?

A: So I’ve been to a lot of crazy places, but one of the ones that really sticks with me is I found this tiny restaurant in a back street in Tokyo that specialized in what they called “gross out food”. The specialty at this restaurant was you would go up to the counter to order the special and they would take a live frog hopping around the counter, they’d flip it over, cut out its heart and you would eat the heart while it was still beating. It was really crazy. 

Q: Did it taste good?

A: It did not taste good at all, but I was there so I ate it.

Q: What was the first car you ever bought? 

A: This might be even worse, but it was a 1990 purplish-pink Ford Escort that had those automatic seatbelts where you turn on the car and the seatbelt automatically pulls across and it’s very uncomfortable and terrible. It was purplish pink and had a spoiler on it, but I bought it because it was really cheap. 

Q: And what would you say was the most irresponsible purchase that you’ve ever made? 

A: Umm I purchased a 2011 Kia Soul and let me tell you out of any car in this world no one should ever drive, it’s a 2011 Kia Soul. It’s color is black like my soul 

Q: What would you say is your favorite topic to teach?

A: While I teach Japanese now, I love teaching a lot of different things about Japan and Japanese culture, touring Japan etc. But in my entire career my favorite thing to ever teach was that I was able to teach about serial killers in America in the 1960’s and 70’s in an American history class using that as a way to look at changes in American culture at that time. That was really really interesting stuff.