Getting up late

I woke up really late today even though I had originally awakened at 5am. I fell asleep and obviously that isn’t a good thing. I ended up leaving my house about an hour after the last time that I was planning to leave. Fortunately I have an alternate route that I could take that cuts the time in half. That way I arrived to work on time just like usual. Actually I was still a bit late since I should have gotten to work earlier.

The first class was with 11^th grade yuri and I think that it went very well. They are a bit excited that they will get their speeches over with next week. They have been laboring on it for a little while now. They were just taking things easy. They don’t really need to worry since I do believe that they will do the best of all the classes. I think that it will be interesting to hear them speak though since it will be in pairs.

The second class today was with 8^th grade yuri. There are still a lot of students absent today and I think that the flu really hit them bad in this class. They had to review lesson 9 in the book. We spent a little too much time working on partner work with them standing up and presenting the part that we covered in the lecture. They seemed to go slower than the other classes, which was weird. I don’t know what happened with the time. We didn’t get to the communication goal part of the chapter, which meant they didn’t get to interview each other. They will be working on their speeches for the speech contest next week.

The third class of the day was with 10^th grade fuji and they had a new papers for their assignment on the environment. We reviewed the pictures from before and asked if they were good or bad and then we worked on a paper that detailed the vocabulary about that topic. It was fairly interesting, but I think it was way too hard for them. The questions and answers weren’t very clear so they had trouble connecting everything together. They needed to work in partners and then they needed to check the answers with the ones posted around the room. They weren’t very clear, but I think that some of the students were able to get it… maybe.

The last class of the day was with 9^th grade fuji. The topic will be on restaurants and food. I didn’t do a good job teaching this class and I know it. I think that it wasn’t very organized to begin with and things didn’t seem interesting to me and to the students. I think that the topic is good, but I just couldn’t find a way for it to work with them and for me. I could tell they were getting bored since we were just going over to the things inside the School Trip book and I didn’t really need to tell them much about the things in the book because they are already in Japanese. It was something that wasn’t easy for me to do because I was afraid of getting bored too. Then I let them look at the menu for California Pizza Kitchen and they needed to pick what food looked good to them for when they go to Santa Barbara. They will be going in only 43 days. It’s coming up faster than anyone could have guessed it would. The last topic of this class will be food and restaurant so we will have to get into different things involving that, but once we finish the entire book during class, it will get interesting because we will have other activities to do.

After school, I didn’t have much to do like usual. I typed up all of this entry at school, which is one of the reasons why I brought my laptop to school. I would like to play some tennis and get out some frustration. I will see how things go though.

It was weird because I was out on the courts earlier than the girls for the tennis club. I was standing out there for like 30 minutes before they were ready to play. By the time they were ready to play, it was dark. During those 30 minutes though, I joined the soft tennis club to hit the ball around with them. They were one person short so it was perfect for me to jump in. I think they are more disciplined than the hard tennis girls. I think that there is a lot of room for improvement in the way that they train too. I suppose that’s my job, but really it’s not. There were only 5 girls playing tennis too, so most of the team wasn’t even there. I think that there were other things going on today and most of the students left home early, which is weird.

I had dinner at Jonathon’s. I got the usual, which was pretty good. It was just the perfect amount too, not too much and not too little and it was healthy. I have been worrying about that recently and I need to take into account for all of the crap I usually eat.