A much better day

Things were much calmer today. I was surprised and it was much appreciated. I had awakened about 30 minutes late, but everything was still ok. Even though I woke up late, I was still able to catch the trains that I needed to, to be able to catch up with the lost time. I even arrived to work pretty early, which isn’t bad since I was able to get more sleep.

The first period 11th grade class was just ok. It could have been better, but I’m still working out the details. I think that I had more of a rhythm today than I’ve had all semester. At first the students were lost on what they had to do in class, but I was only reviewing something that they did last year. The problem was that they didn’t remember the lesson from last year, so I had to review it starting all over again. But it was only the help to lead up to the lesson, which I think worked quite well. I think that after the second time taking a stab at explaining it, it really clicked to the students. I mean some students were finished about 2 minutes after I had finished explaining it. I budgeted for them to spend about 20 minutes, so that obviously wasn’t a good sign. So I had to add more things for their test to make it a bit longer and so they would have something to do for the remainder of the class. I think that my plan to get them to write down something in their own words is really starting to pay off. Not only will I have a variety of speeches to hear for the final, but it will sound more natural since they wrote all the sentences themselves without using any script. That’s the idea at least and I’m expecting it to work. So today’s lesson was on how to get to their favorite location, and we used an example from the book they had from last year. It worked out perfectly for me too.

Then it was an 8th grade class. Things in this class were normal. Nothing too unusual happened today. Everything happened like it normally would have. We covered the lesson on asking questions and they were able to do it. They were a bit loud in the back of the room, but that’s usual; especially since it wasn’t that bad like other classes that I’ve had this week. We did change the last bit of the class to add a little game so the students would have to ask each other how tall they were. But that didn’t work out as well as we thought it would.

The third period class was a test for the 10th graders. They did incredibly well, much better than I thought they would have done. The first girl just got up there and just did a great job. It really shocked the teachers because we didn’t know the level of the students and since some of them aren’t interested and sleep during class usually, they were phenomenal. Not because they weren’t sleeping, but because they were actually pretty good. They had very good fluency and sounded native almost. They were just memorizing from the script though and the topic was self-introduction so it wasn’t too hard. But it is in a foreign language so don’t think it’s too easy. I was surprised that some of the higher level students or the students that actually participate in class weren’t prepared for the test. They only received low scores because they didn’t prepare and it showed clearly. But for the most part, it went very well.

Fifth period was a bit weird. The students were a bit out of it and in their strange world. But then again, so was I. It was starting to warm up a bit and since these students are one of the highest level classes, I think they thought the topic was too easy for them. We were doing talking on the telephone again since we only started it last week with the 9th graders. The class seemed to be moving very fast and we were jumping around the book a lot too. We skipped over the parts that we felt weren’t going to apply and were too obscure to cover.

I think that my strangeness lasted into the sixth period with another 9th grade class. I just drew a blank right when I was teaching the class and didn’t know what I was doing or what was next. It was really weird. It might have been that it was getting warmer or because we were jumping around the book so much that I didn’t really remember what we did. I kept on skipping things and having to go back and cover them later. I did my best to cover everything, but I really just don’t enjoy teaching from a textbook. I don’t think that it’s very flexible for the class and they tend to lose interest. I mean if we broke it down into different sections and handed it out when they needed it, it would help them much more to get the information that they needed to achieve. But that’s another topic. This class was a bit dead today, which I’m not sure the reason why. I had to call on them to participate or they probably would have sat there and done nothing the whole time. Midterms are next week and everyone seems to be weird because of that. I think that might be the answer that I’m looking for. Exams are the blame, but then again, I don’t believe that all the students are studying all that they could be. Anyways, we had a lot of time left for them to make presentations so I called them by numbers and they each had to present.

After school, I was just reading a bit of a book that one of the teachers gave me to read about something, but it’s really an all encompassing book about Japan. It’s really good and well worth spending an hour reading even though I could have left work at this time. I still was able to leave school rather early. I think I walked out the door somewhere in the neighbor hood of 5pm.

I decided that I would go have dinner in a place I haven’t been to before. So I stopped at Shin-Sugita station on the Keihin-Tohoku line or actually the Negishi line. I walked around the station for a little bit looking at all the displays of the foods that all the restaurants sell. I was really interesting in one store that seemed to offer a good amount of food for a reasonable price. I had some noodles and it was absolutely fantastic. I’m sure that I will go back there more because I believe that perhaps other foods there will be tasty as well.

Then I came home and started working on my website and other things like updating my xanga. By this time, I should be all caught up and everything released and online. I’ve left a blog on My Space on MSN that I will release my website address on June 1st Japan Standard Time. I’ve been working a bit too hard on it and want to make it worth it. But I think, at the very least, I should let people get a look at it and give me some feed back on what they like and what they didn’t. It’s only version 1, so there will be many more updates to come. I’m already working on the updates as I’m getting ready for the release.