Debate Test Day

I had left to get to work on time today. Since I began reading the book I’ve been reading, I have started to get a different perspective on my life and the direction that I’m taking. It also has me reflecting on the path that I’ve been on previously too. I think that since I’ve been on both, I’ve got a better background to where I want to go. I still have a long way to go and many more hours of work, blood, sweat, and tears to go through. I realize that I’m only at the beginning and have a really really long way to go. I think that at least the picture is clearer for me. I think that helped me to get through today too. I think that from the first class that we had, it was starting off rocky.

The 9th grade class was a bit out of it today, but not in the sense of being spaced out, they were just chatty. That’s unusual for this class because they normally just sit there, without any response or signs of life. They were incredibly chatty today more than any other time before. It was difficult to get them focused on what the topic of the day was. We were just finishing up on food and how to order and things, since they will be going to Santa Barbara really really soon. It’s in about 2 weeks and right after finals. So they will almost be finished with Junior High School. It just dawned on me now that all this is happening.

My 10th grade classes for the debate. They knew that they had to memorize it and it was incredibly easy, so easy in fact that no one failed. I wouldn’t think that any of them would fail anyways, but I didn’t require much from them especially from what they’ve had to do before.

Yuri: In this class, since it was the first time that I’m giving a test, the boss of the 10th grade oral department came in a helped a little bit. I could understand why she worried. It’s not that she worried about me, but more so about the other teacher. I’ll have to admit, she makes new teacher mistakes and she’s a whale by nature. She’s incredibly beautiful and looks young although she probably isn’t as young as she looks. But she gets in the way of the instructions to the students. I’m not sure if she in fact understands the instructions. We went to this class 10 minutes early to start just to make sure that we would have enough time to finish the exam on time. But eventually we started on time. Only on time, because the students weren’t ready to go yet. It’s the responsibility of the Japanese English teacher to assist me in my lesson, but she gets in the way by actually helping the students in a way that they are the customers. Her job at this point was to get them ready and in their seat so we could start the class and the test. It took about 10 minutes of the students complaining about the test that they’ve known about for 2 months before we even got started with filling all the papers and evaluation sheets.

Luckily the 10th grade oral department chair came in a helped the process along. This is the highest level 10th grade class, but by far one of the most immature. They have the ability to do what I asked them to do and since it was incredibly too easy, I didn’t expect that much bickering about it. But after I got things going, it was going fine. I’m not sure how the other teacher was grading her papers, but I was able to do it in the front of the room, while she was in the back. I’m sure during the day; I might have pissed a few people off. Even knowing this, I did it anyways. After the first group of students went, the second group hadn’t gotten their papers ready, this took another 5-10 minutes of class, and I wasn’t going to have enough time to get all the students to finish, so I made the last group organize their papers too. After all that wasted time, they had mixed up their speaking order and since they didn’t follow my directions by writing their name in English, I wasn’t able to correct their papers. So I had mixed up their scores, meaning I was grading the wrong people. It was ridiculous that they didn’t follow simple directions, and after all that wasted time trying to figure it out, they got it wrong. This was after the department chair left too. And to top everything off, there was an EARTHQUAKE right in the middle of the test. I realized at this point, I wasn’t prepared to handle and earthquake right in the middle of testing. Fortunately it wasn’t a horrible one or a big one. It was just enough to shake up the building and ruin the rhythm of my class. Over the past 5 weeks or so, this has been the only class that has been giving me trouble. Not so much from the students, but from the help. We ended the class 5 minutes over and there were still looming problems that would have to be solved out of class.

Kiku: in this class, things went so smooth. Everything went like clockwork. It just ticked and everything was fine. There wasn’t a single problem with the instructions that I gave, which was the exact same from the first class. They all understood what I wanted, they knew it was a test and they were ready for it. This is one of the lowest level classes, but they performed at a higher level than the last class. They seemed as if they were more prepared to go than the last class too. My help in this class has more experience as well, but she can be described as “unfriendly” sometimes. But she knows how to do her job. The only bad comment I would make about this class was that they organized in groups quite slow, but I think that’s because they were processing what I was talking about. We started later and ended earlier with the same instructions and everything. I’ll give the other class some credit that this class is smaller, but still.

Fuji: This is a big class, one of the most problematic classes in the entire school, but today, I didn’t have a single problem. Everything went perfectly. Once again, everything worked out fine because I knew that the plan wasn’t flawed, and I gave enough preparation to the students that they were not only confident enough to speak, but to do it well. I only had a few instances the whole day that I heard Japanese-English meaning saying English words with a Japanese tone. I mean all the students really sounded like they were speaking English. Some of the students during the last oral test decided to take a zero than to speak, so I think we’ve made some improvements. Even though this class was larger than the last and about the same as the first 10th grade class, we finished early. That’s how smooth it was.

Ran: This class was really on top of things. Since the 10th grade teacher in this class had saw how I organized the first class, she had the girls already grouped up in the correct order and explained everything before I even got there. That’s how on top of the ball she was. It went smoothly because they were prepared. They are a higher level class too in a sense that they understand and have the ability to do what is necessary, but I think they don’t provide the creativity that the Kiku class has. I only had a few students do poorly in this class, which was the bad part. I would have hoped that they did better, but it is what it is.

All in all, I think today went pretty well, even with the problems in the Yuri class. The test was a success, and it did sound like they were really debating. They have room for improvement, but then again, it’s a foreign language. If my Japanese teacher at Grossmont told me I had to debate my classmates in Japanese, I’d laugh at her because that would be incredibly impossible. I’d probably do worse than my students did in English. So they did well. I would have hoped for more, but you can’t expect that to happen over night or even in a process of 6 weeks. It’s only one day a week, which isn’t enough focus on the oral communication to be able to be effective. Anyways, that’s a whole another issue.

Afterwards, I just chilled out in the office. Since I was technically on vacation already, I didn’t end up leaving till around 7pm. I studied up to 100 kanji characters now. At least I can write them all and know most of their pronunciations. Each Chinese character has three and sometimes more ways to pronounce it. That makes learning the language tough. As it was getting time to leave, one of the teachers invited me to their house for dinner; actually it was the teachers that are married to each other. I thought that was pretty cool, it’s not the first invitation, but the first that I’m going to take. I’ve been warned by the boss that her cooking sucks though, it was quite funny and she told me that I get to try it now and judge for myself. She says it’s safe because other teachers will be eating it too, but that doesn’t mean anything in reality.

I also asked a teacher a question that no department could answer. I asked two teachers in the science department, a history teacher, an English teacher, a math teacher, and a Japanese language teacher about something that I noticed on the calendar they had given to all the teachers as a New Years gift. But they couldn’t answer it, but after about 10 minutes we all came to the conclusion of what it could be. But not a, for sure, reason what it meant. It was about a kanji character next to the month.