A slow day for me

I don’t like having nothing to do. I usually finish everything early so I don’t have much to do at work. I didn’t have class till the afternoon, so I left my house at 11am. There was a problem with the Toyoko line today, although I never found out the reason why. I still got to school before lunch started, which was what I planned to do. After lunch was finished, I had class with 10th grade yuri. They were very bored today. They were just humoring CP and it’s sad that she doesn’t see that. The object of today’s class was to play a game using a coin and to ask each other questions and finish sentences. I thought the assignment was a bit childish for them and at their level. They spent most the class that one paper too. I mean about 40 minutes and then they got another paper for them to unscramble sentences and put them in the correct order. That was very easy for them, which was a bit of a surprise for me. I didn’t think that it would be that easy for them.

Now I wonder if that’s the same for me and whether or not the students are just humoring me and just doing it, but not really learning it. That’s going to bother me for awhile since I now know about it. I know that sometimes I make things too easy for my students and that is used to build their confidence. But I’m not sure if I’m letting them get away with not doing enough work too. So I have some reflecting to do.

The second class I had today was with 8th grade fuji. Last year, they were at the lowest level, and this year it’s a mixed bag since they are not ordered by their English ability but by other subjects. Some are good while others really struggle with the English. They only worked on writing their introduction speeches today so that they would be able to present them next week. That was pretty easy for them to write, but I’m interested in seeing how they present it next week.

After school I pretty much chilled in the LL. I met some new students to the school in the 10th grade that I don’t teach. They are pretty interesting. They were trying to speak English, which was good. I’m glad that they were at least willing to since the other students that I taught last year and also in the room weren’t interested in it. I was working on recovering some files that were lost in the English department. There was a flood of problems recently with the disks being used, so I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. One of the problems I couldn’t solve and gave up. The other problem, is still unresolved because I extracted the lost files, but unable to read the extracted part.

I also talked to a new teacher for a little bit. I was trying to help her with finding some songs that are good for the students to listen to that are in English. I recommended some Disney songs, but some of them are too hard for them to catch the meanings and words. So I need to research it.

I also realized that I have more work on the text book that I haven’t finished yet. I have to do that right now since it’s almost midnight and I need to take care of that tonight before class starts. I need to get a listening practice with questions and answers done now. So I’ll write more later.

I had dinner at the curry restaurant at Yokohama station. It was the first time that I had dinner outside of my house in a long time. I came home and watched a little baseball before I started working on updating my journal and working on some of the things I needed to take care of.