By far the most challenging class of my week is turning out to be the first class with the youngsters. Actually, all the students are good to go but one, Yuzuha. Yuzuha is only three, and she is pretty high maintenance.
Today we were doing shapes, and I had some shapes leftover from another class. They were laminated for their own protection. I showed the students the shapes and told them the English name, and then Yuzuha was trying to grab them out of my hands. I told her to wait, but she kept trying to grab them. After I finished with the shapes I gave one shape to each student. Yuzuha was trying to grab them from the other students right away. It was then that we noticed that one of the shapes looked a little dirty. When we examined it, it turned out to be a little bit of blood. We checked Yuzuha’s finger, and she had a tiny cut from grabbing the laminated shapes.
I wanted to savor the simple instant karma. I wanted to be able to see the logic click inside Yuzuha’s head that being greedy and grabbing things away from other people ended up being a bad thing for her (and her finger). But, alas, even though the instant karma was there, Yuzuha’s recognition of it wasn’t.
Yuzuha was looking around at the shapes and enjoying having so many for herself, and when we pointed out that her finger had some blood coming out, she started crying like someone had just cut her finger off. I took her into the bathroom to clean it up, but I couldn’t find any band-aids. We had to make do with some tissues as a temporary bandage. Yuzuha clung onto me as the nearest adult and held on tight, seeking comfort. Her sister was a big help and tried to comfort Yuzuha as well. She was out of action for the last ten minutes of class though.
While all this was going on the other students were sitting around watching idly, and not learning any English. They are troupers, though – they helped out a lot too. I wasn’t able to do what I wanted today in the lesson, but I think everyone will understand.
After class the mother of another one of the students was waiting outside to walk her daughter home, and she noticed the makeshift bandage on Yuzuha right away. I explained what happened and she was kind enough to walk with Yuzuha and her sister to make sure they got home all right.
So I went back inside and cleaned up the blood in the bathroom and on the shapes, and by then I already had the next class showing up.
What a way to start off the day.
The good news is that the next two classes are really good and after babying the younger students through a lesson, these ones were a breeze. In the evening I had a junior high school lesson, and that was a lot of fun, too. The students in the junior high school lesson are really comfortable with each other and because of that they are loose and ready to try speaking English.
Kuniko had a party this evening but she came home early, citing talkative middle aged part time coworkers as the reason the party sucked. I stayed up past midnight, Kuniko stayed up until around one, and then we crashed out. Kuniko has Wednesday off of work because of her school’s foundation day. Most schools have the date it first opened off, and tomorrow is her school’s foundation day. Lucky, lucky.
