YYto's Birthday

I actually called him today to wish him Happy Birthday until my minutes ran out on my pre-paid cell phone. Which forces me to either renew the pre-paid or buy a REAL cell phone. Right now I've been doing my research on the different cell phone companies here in Japan. I've narrowed it down to Vodafone (a Brittish company) and NTT DoCoMo (my favorite Japanese company). I'm looking at the prices and seeing which one takes a big hit to my wallet. I think the Japanese cell phones are the best in the world, with their high tech gadgets and stuff like that. I'm looking to get a video-streaming phone, one of the most state of the art piece of machines.
Anyways, this will be an easy week for me because I get a lot of days off. I stay home more than I have to go to work this week, so obviously that's good.

Today I have a full day of work. The lesson plans for today was watching students give self-introductions. This is the 8th grade we're speaking about. Once again, I can see that there are glaring flaws in the system, when they struggle to talk about themselves. But that's that I get paid to do, fix them.

For the 7th grade, we played a game where we were learning about the things around the classroom. CP wrote the things on post-it notes and the students ran all around to post things on the item that was written on the note. It was fun, although short lived. I'm going to be teaching this class on Saturday, but I really didn't prepare for much. I think I'm going to do the same thing I did last week, but I know it might be repeative since CP and I are relatively doing the same things... she's making my job harder than it has to be. But I've just got to get creative about it.

The 12th grade was working on their vacation presentation again. I think one of the flaws is going to damn slow. I feel we give the students too much time to carry out simple tasks. Although some of them really might need the time. I think we should move faster to encourage them to catch up faster and therefore learn faster. But what do I know, I'm new at this. So I could, perhaps, be wrong. But I would like to try it out anyways. Since I feel as if there really isn't much to lose if I do, and things can only get better from my standpoint.

The plot thickens in the Da Vinci Code. Starting to get juicy good, which is weird since I'm over half way done with the book. From what it seems, it's all in a span of a day too, just like Angels and Demons. Seems pretty dense for a book of 500 pages or so.

Book of the Moment - Dan Brown - The Da Vinci Code