First day of school

It wasn’t so bad today, but it wasn’t so great either. The good part was that I got up early and could take care of some things. I woke up at 8:30am today and had a late breakfast before I started off to work. It was raining pretty hard, but by the time I left the house the rain had stopped. It was the first time that I didn’t carry an umbrella to work when it looked like it was going to rain. I had confidence that it wouldn’t rain anymore, and I was right.

I was feeling pretty good today since I didn’t have to be at work till around 1pm, but I got there a bit early. I arrived around 12:30pm. I helped some of the teachers with the preparations for my 11th grade classes. They were making the textbooks that I had prepared for them. It was pretty cool to see it all laid out and actually in book form. I actually get to see it lived through and hopefully it will produce the results that I’m looking for. It was totally weird walking in the office in the afternoon and only having two classes today. It was weird, but a great feeling at the same time.

The first class I had for 5th period was with 10th grade Yuri. This is the highest level English class of the grade level. It really has all the upper level students, but I feel that the class isn’t challenging for them. The course material will be too easy for them and I could really tell that. Today I got the syllabus, well somewhat of a syllabus, for the whole year. It basically outlined the objectives and goals for the year, but nothing really concrete and itemized by days. So we were welcoming them to high school by letting them know that they will have more tests. Aren’t we the greatest teachers? The topic for the day was past activities, which is way too easy for them. I think it’s actually a joke to be teaching them that since they learn that in the 7th grade. They did very well, of course, and all seemed a bit bored by it. I don’t really blame them since I was getting bored and actually started making a lot of mistakes in front of the room because I wasn’t paying attention. It’s really bad and I’m not sure if it was me being still on spring break or just something, but it was unusual for me.

The last class today was with 8th grade Fuji. They aren’t as bad as I originally thought since it is all mixed up with members being from all of the classes last year. There are some good English speakers as well as some bad ones. They were getting an introduction of the Expressways Standard book and their diaries. We started a bit on introductions and greetings, which is lesson one. Some did it fairly well, while others were struggling. It’s really a mixed bag and it will be interesting how things will turn out for the rest of the semester. The Japanese English teacher is a bit worried about her English, so it will be interesting how that will play out too since I’m not sure if the translations will be up to par. But I think overall, everything will be ok.

After school, I went up the LL and started working on finishing up my textbook for the second topic, which I did in a relatively short time. I had it all printed out too, which was great for me. I had also finished making up the vocabulary quizzes for the whole semester too. The last thing I need to work on is the listening tests, and listening practices. That should be pretty easy since I got most of the hard stuff out of the way. I think things are really starting to turn out well for me recently so that has been good for me. I am just glad to have gotten everything out of the way and now I can really relax for the last semester that I’m here. It is really all just coasting now. I helped the other teachers for a little bit too. CP was trying to get online, which I helped her to do. Mr. Ito was looking for pictures for CP to have in class to show the 9th graders to get them excited about going to Santa Barbara. He spent about 30 minutes to look for pictures, but couldn’t find any, but I spent a total of 2 minutes and found two that he subsequently used. It was really convenient for him to drop by when I had access to everything at my fingertips. But that wasn’t it. When I went back to the teacher’s office, he had already laminated it and made it a bit bigger. He was looking to add some adhesive magnets on there, but they didn’t have any. But I did, so I brought my stack out and helped him out there too. So I really felt like I was of some use today too. I was talking with my department chair for a little bit today. She was showing me some pictures of the Santa Barbara trip from when she went 6 years ago. Wow, that sounds like a long time ago. I also hinted to her, that I might go back to California next week too. But since I haven’t made any plans to, I doubt I will, but if I don’t hear anything from the other universities by the 17th then I’m going to started to make plans to leave Friday night after school. I’ll have to see the feasibility of it though and see how that will work out.

I left school after 30 minutes of just hanging out celebrating the fact that I’m done with all my work. There were surprisingly a lot of English teachers in the teacher’s office since usually they are never around. I think that almost all of them were there. I came home and started to make dinner immediately. It took much longer than I thought that it would. I didn’t finish everything cooking and eating till 9:30pm, which was later than I wanted to. I was watching this TV show that was like Iron Chef, but it was with two different celebrities and their team. It was Males versus Females. The males won in surprising fashion, but it was really cool what the male team made. The leader of the female team was Sayaka Aoki, so I didn’t think that it was really that fair. I don’t believe that she’s much of a Chef and she did have a lot of help from someone that could have helped her win if she was the lead cook. Anyways, that’s it.