A fairly quick Wednesday

Today flew by really quickly. I'm a bit surprised at how fast today went. I woke up early today, but I left my house late. I can't believe that I did that because I left about 30 minutes late. I'm usually good with that, but somehow I managed to get on my computer and time just went right by. It was almost like a sprint to the train station, but I managed to get to school on time. I missed the teacher's meeting in the morning, but I didn't want to go to it anyways.

First period was with 11^th grade yuri and i pretty much did what I did yesterday with fuji. I gave them some time to work on their speech paper, and giving them the four questions that I had given them last week and let them work for about 20 minutes with the brochures. Then we played a little shiritori game where they have to write a word that starts with the same letter as the last letter of the previous word. I did nouns and adjectives for this class. They got stuck on adjectives that start with Y. That is a bit tricky, but overall, I think they did a very good job.

Second period was with 8^th grade yuri. They had a quiz much like the 8^th grade class before it. They performed the Blue Bird, so they had similar questions like the class I taught with kiku yesterday. Many of the student groups had high scores. They did a good job and understood a good majority of the questions and answers.

Third period was with 10^th grade fuji. This class really is something else. They have a particular talent with just spacing out. Every student in that class always seems like they are sleeping, but wide awake. It's very trippy. I'm not sure how much they understand or how much they don't understand. We do break it down to a level that's lower than junior high school, but they just don't seem to respond to anything. It's hard working with this class and we spend a lot of time today on something that was supposed to take only 5 minutes. It was on a paper that we worked on last week too. We were supposed to work on Last Christmas, a song by Wham. It's an incredibly popular song here during this time of the year. We didn't get into much of it since we spent so much time on the other things. We did start on it though and we wanted to get them thinking about what kind of song it is and what's the meaning of the song. Most could hear the words, and probably understand some of the vocabulary, but I don't believe that they could get the meaning of the song.

Fifth period, with the 9^th grade kiku class, we went over the topic of money again. They needed the practice since they will go to Santa Barbara soon. It really isn't that far away, even though it will be in March. They were struggling a little bit with the decimal point and putting the zero as a place holder for $1.06. That was the point of the lesson, so I'm glad that some of the students made that mistake so we could point it out to them.

We did the same thing for the 9^th grade Fuji class. They did a better job of recognizing the money and learned how to use it effectively. I was very proud of them, although some of the students did bother me by not paying attention. It's the usual students and the major problem that I've had since I've been teaching is that I'm not good with getting attention of the students. It's the problem that I have had since the beginning of me teaching and with all of my classes. The reason being, I'd rather be the good-liked teacher and since it's not my job to handle behavior issues, I don't. But I think next time, I'll have to go with another approach.

After school, I had to give a make-up listening test for a student. Other than that, I was home-free and left. I did wait an hour before I did leave since I would have the day off and I don't have to show up until 3^rd period on Friday.