Having two classes today is nice

I really didn’t feel like I had much to do today since I only had two classes and I was allowed to come to school much later than usual. I think that I really get a chance to relax a little bit more when I have this kind of time to do what I feel I need to do. I still woke up early today, but not because of the sun, more because I was trying to cut my hair last night, but the new clippers that I bought didn’t work. So I tried it again this morning. Once again, it didn’t work which really irritated me because I had just bought it and this was the first time I used it. But I think it might have the same problem as the old one that I have which is the voltage. I also need to keep them really oiled down so they won’t make such a loud noise. I had messed up, so I switched to the older clippers, which didn’t give me a problem at all. I thought that was really nice and really appreciated that I kept it even though I wasn’t planning on using it again.

I think that the day started off really early for me, so it was a relief that I had the time to do these things in the morning. I think that I was also quite lucky because I was able to sit down on the train going to work today. I mean there weren’t that many people using the trains and I was able to sit on both the trains I use to get to work. That’s really nice since I was carrying my laptop the whole way. It gets a bit heavy at times, so it’s nice to rest my shoulders and sit down.

The first class I had today was the 9th graders. They were a bit out of it today. I’m not sure if that was usual, but they just didn’t respond as well as I thought they would have. They aren’t the highest level, but I thought they would at least do something. I think for the most part they understood what was going on, but they were just out of it. I felt it was pretty tough to get through, but I wasn’t teaching the class, and just tried my best to get things moving along so that there wouldn’t be any problems.

The second class I had today was the 7th graders. They are a higher level class than all the other 7th graders. I think their ability is quite good for Japanese standards. They are able to distinguish between R and L. Those two sounds plague regular Japanese people with the English language. You might have heard the term Engrish, which is a play on the word English. We want to make the distinction early on so that we won’t have students saying that they want to eat lice for dinner. So I think this class was able to do that. They were enjoying themselves and I think this class moved a bit faster than the others too. We were able to finish in much shorter time than any of the other classes that I have taught with for the 7th grade.

After my classes, I was able to set up my laptop and punch up this entry. I think that with this remaining time, I will try to catch up on the other entries that I’ve seem to fallen behind on. I’m masking what I’m really doing by making a PowerPoint presentation for one of my students that I teach on Saturday. I think that I’ve made a pretty good impression on my co-workers because of the last one that I did, and how effective it was and the learning processes that I have created. I really impressed my Department Chair the other night too, when she was taking a look at it. So let’s see if I could keep it going.

After school today, I joined the English club since I haven’t seen them in a long time. I didn’t go at all last week and didn’t really understand how that happened. But this week we talked about Golden Week and then we did another activity with listening and comprehension. I think that their comprehension is getting much better. They still have some work with the grammar, but that isn’t really my job. We were listening to the Timesaver Raps book that CP bought when she went to the JALT conference last year. It was pretty good, but there are some glaring mistakes with the workbook from the songs on the CD. That gets to be a little distracting and nothing really could become accomplished when there are that many mistakes. Today we listened to The Best Friend Rap and the topic of the day was Best Friends. It was pretty interesting. There were some mistakes in the workbook that the teachers didn’t like, but there isn’t much we could do about that right now.