Tired on a short Wednesday

I was very tired in the morning for some reason. I felt as if I got enough sleep, but my eyes just wanted to be closed. I was moving very slowly in the morning and was off to a slow start.

I stopped off at yoshinoya for lunch. It was good and actually very quick. I was surprised at how fast I got it and how fast I finished it. I didn’t think that I had all that much time to be able to do it.

The first class that I had today was 5th period with 10th grade yuri. They were working on a new paper and it was about the trips. The main focus is on the trip to Santa Barbara and it was tailored for that, but some students didn’t go, so it needed to be more open. They had a paper with questions asking them about what they did, who they met, what they ate, and things like that. They spent the whole period working on that paper. Most of the students didn’t get a chance to finish it all either, which was a bit surprising. There was one girl in the class that actually had all the receipts that she got from her trip to Santa Barbara. It was pretty interesting and it looked as if she spent a lot of money.

The last class I had today was with 8th grade fuji and they just gave their self-introduction speeches. They were very nervous about it since they haven’t given any speeches before and now they were sort of getting graded for it. They didn’t do a terrible job but they weren’t all that great either. I think that they were cramming at the last minute and thought that we would go easy on them and they could read the book while they were up there. But we forced them to memorize it and go up and recite it. It was pretty interesting how they made mistakes and how the other students were teleprompting to the ones up in front of the room.

I spent most of the day burning CDs for the recitation contest. It was pretty good since I have a new computer now and it goes fairly quick. We only used two laptop computers to do all the burning. We were able to finish 160 CDs in one full day with two people working on it and about 30 minutes last night. It went very well, I didn’t have to stay at school for a long time, but I wanted to get some things done and prepared for the Thursday and Friday 11th grade classes. They will need to begin to work on some researching and in groups and they need to tackle a problem in the world and to be able to present something on it in a speech. I’m not even near completion though, which is a problem. I need to have all the papers copied and ready for the class before tomorrow though, so I probably will be at school for a little while.

After this, I went to the LL and worked on getting my computer hooked up with the school’s wireless printers, but it didn’t work out very well for me. So I gave up and I wanted to print out some things to go over some information for the 11th grade classes. But I couldn’t dig up any information so I decided to scrap the idea and just let the students make it up. I figure that having them research will get a little boring anyways and I need them to communicate better anyways. So I will have them work in their groups and to make up ideas for their presentation. I know that I’m not setting them up for success though since I know they aren’t capable of handling a difficult subject matter like global poverty. But I will try and see how things go. Once I try things out, I’ll see how things will go for the next topic of world travel.

I typed the previous at school, but I later realized that it wasn’t nearly the end of the workday for me. After we finished burning all the CDs we had to check to see if they work and we started to listen to all of them to make sure that all the tracks play. Each CD has about 4 minutes worth of voice recording and it’s of the same thing, so it got mundane. It was actually horrible because I really don’t like the recitation contest to begin with and now it just rubs it in my face. At least we didn’t have to do it on tapes, which were done last year. This is the first year that they rolled out the new technology for the students and put all the voice recordings onto CDs. Thanks to my help of course… I had to add the self-props because no one else does. I left school pretty late, around 7:15pm again.

I decided to grab dinner at Matsuya near Kikuna station because it was convenient and fast. I wanted to get home in a hurry and get some rest. I was very tired today for some odd reason. I think it was listening to all those CDs and making all those CDs. I didn’t get to sleep till around midnight, which seems to be the norm now. I got some news from my family that things are now squared away with that, but my sister has the stomach flu, which is something EXTREMELY TERRIBLE. My sister’s computer is also up to par with a new partitioned hard drive, so things should be running smoothly. I need to ask how things are though.