Second week of school

I didn't sleep well last night. I'm not sure why, but I woke up before my alarm went off, and that's at 5:30am. I got ready in enough time and even was able to check all my e-mail accounts. I left my house when I wanted to and I was able to catch the bus, and the trains that I needed to get on to get to work. That's kinda rare to be honest with you. I got to school around 8:20am, but I couldn't get into the office because there was a teacher's meeting.

I was told that now I have to attend the teacher's meeting, even though it's all in Japanese, and my Japanese still hasn't improved. That's horrible. But now I have to leave even earlier to be able to attend that meeting even though I don't have a class first period. It's a little way too early now. So I just sat there trying to figure out the schedule for the day and for the week. We have 40 minute classes this week because of preparations for the Sports Day festival this Saturday. Today we also had 7 periods, when we usually have 6. The 7th period was dedicated to the dance practice for the festival.

Second Period was interesting. The class was too quiet, I mean way too quiet. I was introducing myself since it was the first time I was teaching the class since last week, I was just observing. They only asked one question, when is my birthday? Which is a new question, so that's good. But they weren't curious about anything else. I don't think that lacked the ability to ask, since it was the 9th grade class. Their English ability should be better. But last week it was a quiet class as well.

Third Period, I switched English Teaching partners and had a set of 10th grade classes. The activities of the day were just finish up the song from last week and directions and instructions. I thought the activity was well thought out, but maybe a little hard to manage with a lot of people. Some students work hard at it, while others joke around. So I make sure I work with the students that joke around. I make them read everything to me and give me the answers, so I can see if they can do it. But I help them if they have trouble, and at least the class won't be so loud. The same thing happened in all the other classes, so that was pretty easy.

Lunch time was when I distributed all the candy that I bought in Sapporo. Some really liked it and appreciated it, but I don't think that many others did. I didn't really matter, I'm just trying to give a peace offering so that the teachers would be more open to talk to me. Most are really shy because of their ability to speak English. But I always hear my name being called and something being said. Not sure if it's good or not, but I'm sure it's nothing bad....Yet. I've been put into some pretty bad situations so far, but I've managed not to cause too much damage to the structure of things. It's interesting to see the way that teachers interact with each other. You'd always have to be watchful of your back, but I think these teachers are really nice and actually welcoming, they aren't faking it. From the stories that I've heard from other people, I'm not too sure about anything about working in Japan.

I stayed afterschool because I'm required to stay until 5pm even if I have nothing to do. But I had English Conversation club, so I did have something to do. In English club, we just play the Game of LIFE. It's actually a pretty fun game. We finished and at the End I won... again. hahaahahaha. I'm such a bad teacher, I always beat the students. But I teach them along the way. It's kinda tricky how I always force them to speak English. They are naturally speaking in Japanese, but I wiggle some English in there. I taught them high numbers like million, billion and trillion. And they got it. I just hope it sticks till next week. If not, I'll have to do it again, but I would like to move on to harder things.After that, I went home. It was already around 7pm by the time I went back to my office and wrote in my daily class journal about each class. I arrived at Yokohama station and I was looking for a place to eat, but there weren't any good ones. I was looking for Yoshinoya. I've been missing that lately, but I couldn't find it. I was sooo hungry at this point so I went back to Hongodai, and guess where I ate... I went to McDonalds to get a Big Mac and Teriyaki Burger. Then went home.