Ecuador and Costa Rica

The first class that I had today was with 9th grade yuri. They were working on the chapter about directions. They will have a test on directions coming up in two weeks. We just followed along with the book. That was pretty much it with the class.

The second class 4th period was with 7th grade ume. We were working on a counting the beans game. The girls were split up into groups of 4 and then they needed to count beans. First they would need to guess how many were in a jar first. They would have to count them one at a time and each member of the group would count the number in the consecutive order. So the first student would count one and the second two and then they would do that till the end of a cup and then they would switch cups until they counted all the beans in all the cups. It was a fun little game for them to learn how to count and numbers. They were really going at it and they were all speaking in English. So that was the best thing. They didn’t cheat and were honest with it. So I was happy with that.

After lunch, I had class with 11th grade yuri and I gave out their vocabulary quiz and then we did the listening test. Things were a bit rushed and we only ended up with 10 minutes for them to finish up their writing for the speech test. The whole while, they were complaining a lot. I was a bit shocked that they were doing that so much. They were talking throughout both tests and I did give them big hints on how and what to do, so I really don’t understand why they were complaining so much.

The last class of the day was with 11th grade fuji and we had to hurry up because they are a much lower level than all of the other classes, so I wanted to make sure that they had enough time to take care of what they needed to take care of. We ended up with 15 minutes for them to work on their speeches after the listening test and the vocabulary quiz. The thing I was surprised with was that they didn’t complain that much. It was a hard listening test, but I thought that they would complain that it was too hard since the last class did. I think that it is the difference in attitude that made the difference here.

After school, I was working on the correcting of all their listening tests and vocabulary quizzes. They had some weird ones that I saw because they did O and X instead of T and F for True and False. So I had to deduct some points for that since they couldn’t follow the directions in Japanese. There were other ones too that threw me off. So I had to wait around till the head person for the 11th grade to see what she would say. I found them in the part-time teachers’ office and we were talking about the average age of the teachers in the Full time teacher’s office. We found out that the average was 33 years old, but it used to be 27. So it went up, which is weird. I’m one of the youngest in the office, but there are a lot of young teachers. Because of this, I didn’t end up leaving till around 8:15pm. I was talking to some teachers and they were asking me about things because they know that I won’t be around too much longer so they needed to get things out of the way. At the very end, the VP talked to me and asked me some things that we were talking about at the Tonkatsu place. So I had to ask another teacher if he was “gomasuri otoko” which is a play on words in Japanese. Goma is sesame in Japanese and to Goma suru is to grind sesame. But gomasuri is brownnosing. So I had to ask the teacher if he was Japan’s number one brownnoser. That was a bit embarrassing since I had to do it in front of all the teachers. But they all knew that I had to because I didn’t know what I was saying and because the VP told me to.

From there I went to have dinner at a ramen restaurant that another teacher recommended to me. It was actually pretty good and I was glad that I went to someplace new. I enjoyed it and then went home. I met some student teachers on the way home, but they didn’t recognize me and didn’t acknowledge me. They probably didn’t see me since they were talking in their group of 4 and probably didn’t notice too much. They left school around 8:30pm, which is really late. From there I went home.