a pretty typical Tuesday

Nothing exciting happened today. So I don’t really have much to report. I’ve been a bit more annoyed with my teaching partner and I think all the Japanese English teachers agree with me too. It’s distracting when I’m teaching class and it is for them too.

The first class today was the 8th grade ran. They were inattentive like usual and didn’t really care today. We were focusing on getting them ready for British Hills since that will be on Thursday. We listened to the rap for American Cousin again. We worked on a little worksheet that went with the song. We didn’t go into that for very long before we moved onto the next thing. It was pretty good, but nothing too special. Then we went over some vocabulary and other things. We finished with a dialogue in the book.

The second class was 8th grade kiku. They were surprisingly loud and talkative today. I was really about to give up teaching this class and I really didn’t want to. After a little bit and all the distractions from my teaching partner, I kind of gave up in the middle and didn’t teach with the enthusiasm that I usually teach with. I’m letting her affect my teaching ability and I really don’t like that. We didn’t get that far in this class. Since they are lower level I had to go a bit slower for them to understand and that usually means that they aren’t able to keep up or even do the same activities in the other classes.

The third class today was 7th grade kiku. They are usually a good bunch and that was no exception today. We worked on sports and I thought we were going to start doing something with music since we had a music handout, but it didn’t end up that way. I really have no idea where they are going with this class since the syllabus still hasn’t been figured out. I think that’s a bad thing for the students to have the teacher be so disorganized and not know where the class is going or even what direction. I find it very hypocritical to be nagging on me that I’m not going where I want them to go and to have someone always in the back of the room telling me what to do, when she has no idea where her classes are or where they are going.

The last class of the day for me was 11th grade fuji. They had their listening comprehension test. They struggled a little bit more than the other classes, but most did well or fairly well. I didn’t think that the test would be that easy, but it was very easy as it turned out. So the next test will have to be much harder so the points will be different at the end of the semester. I also gave them time to finish up writing their summaries for their speeches. It looks like for most people their speeches will be very short.

After class, I noticed that I was finished for the day. It went by really fast today and I’m not sure why. It just zipped on by and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad either. I didn’t go the English Club meeting till and I absolutely had to. I wanted to avoid contact with them for a little while.