A fairly average Tuesday

It was a bit difficult to get up today. I slept late last night so that made it harder for me to get up. I think that I’ve got to get to sleep earlier so I could just get up in the morning. It’s been tough recently because of the cold.

The four usual classes today were all fairly usual. The first class was with 8^th grade ran and they were loud like usual. I think that the Japanese English teacher isn’t very strict with the students and that’s why they take advantage of the situation and talk throughout the whole class. I heard that the first period class with 8^th grade is worse, and it’s with the same Japanese English teacher. I wonder what could be the thing that is common. They are high level and will probably do the best in the speech contest in March and they have won a lot of events during the year, which makes them upper-level. The lesson today was with chapter 9 in the Expressways book. It was covering hobbies. We did the second half of the chapter and then we had the students continue with interviews. It was tough just to get through it.

The second class of the day was with 8^th grade kiku. They have really become delightful to teach. I used to be a bit nervous since they had a bad reputation for mis-behaving and just being loud. But they really aren’t in my class. I’ve never had to raise my voice at them and they really participate. They also had the same lesson as the previous class covering chapter 9 and it was vastly different with attitude and behavior. Many of the students participated and they really enjoyed all the work too. I think that they are getting the hang of English. They didn’t like it at the beginning of the year and that was clear, but I can see them change a little today. They were really good and able to do things that the upper-level students could do. I know that their comprehension has gotten better since we test that every week.

The third class today was with 7^th grade kiku. We worked on a new topic and new papers today. They all got a sheet of paper with letters from A – Z and they had to name an animal that fit into the category. Who would have thought that there aren’t very common ones for U, N, X, Y, there are some, but they aren’t well known. I think the students got stuck on those. They got to use their dictionary to find them out, but it took up the majority of the class time going over it and introducing it. There was supposed to be another activity too, but we didn’t have enough time to get into it.

The last class of the day was with 11^th grade fuji. They are the first in the rotation so I introduced some things that they need to be prepared for, for next week’s test. They were a bit shocked that it came so fast, but there aren’t many classes left. I just went over the problems that I saw on their papers and explained some things like large numbers and some grammar points. They weren’t really attentive, but they got their papers back and they sort of worked on it a little. I’m not sure how well they will do, but it will be interesting.

After school, I hung around for the English club. Today all the club members showed up at one point or another. There was one 7^th grade student that I have hardly seen since I have been one of the co-advisors, but she was there today. I brought my souvenir from Odaiba for them to munch on and I’m happy that I was able to do that for them. They were preparing to make a presentation for tomorrow that will be presented to the seniors who will be graduating soon. They were going to make a video so they needed to make a script and practice reading it over and how they wanted to do it. The 7^th graders left at about 5:30pm, which is about 30 minutes after they were supposed to. The 11^th grade students didn’t end up leaving till around 7pm. That’s extremely late for me and something that I didn’t want to deal with, but I think that it was good for the students to be practicing English and going over their lines. So I stayed around for them to practice and to use the room.

I was talking with another teacher that I haven’t talked to in a long while, and then I left school. I grabbed dinner at MOS burger and had to eat and go since I didn’t have much time before I needed to go to sleep. I didn’t end up going to sleep till around Midnight, and that’s very late since I have to get up early tomorrow.