The Drama

I’ve been plugging away at my classes this week and Kuniko has been just at busy at work. We’ve both been getting in late, so I’ve been too tired to post anything lately. I thought this morning that I’d take the time to catch things up a little.

Yesterday I sent off my graduate school application, so lets hope that they see it in a good light and allow me to spend too much money on higher education. The decision making process should last about a month – that means that I should know by the end of June.

I had to have one of my noisy students stay after class for a brief discussion about his behavior. Hayaki is always noisy, and he does whatever he can to get the attention of the people around him. Mainly I think he’s looking for attention from the two girls in the class, Ryoka and Manami. Today he was being noisy and distracting, and after I asked him three times to be quiet Manami told me that he was making it hard for them to study. Hayaki heard this, and he quieted down a little bit.

After class I told him that he should at least have the courtesy to not both other students, and that I thought he could be pretty good at English if he really tried. I wanted to say that by goofing off in class you aren’t impressing those girls, and you’re making yourself look stupid. Maybe I’ll save that conversation for the next time he acts out.

In another class this week one of my students was acting up and the other students kind of self-policed him. We were playing concentration, and all the students were really into the game, memorizing the location of cards that I had laid out on the table. Fuwa decided to be cute and mix a bunch a cards up. That pissed off the other students and a girl really laid into him for doing something like that. I was surprised to see him start crying, but I figured it was best to let her words sink in a little.

As you can see my job has a lot more to it than just teaching English. Managing the relationships and behavior in the class plays a bigger role than I had expected. I keep thinking that these experiences will help me down the road in raising my own little munchkins.

It has been a wet week, but luckily I have yet to get caught out in the rain. In the mornings the last couple of days it has been raining hard, but by the time I’m leaving for work things have stopped. On my way home it tends to be just cloudy, so I’ve been lucky.

That’s about all that’s been happening. Not too exciting. I’ve had the travel bug lately, and I’m really looking forward to Hawaii in August. We’re hoping to take a trip to Okinawa sometime after the summer ends, and next year is still up in the air. One destination that is being tossed around is Viet Nam, so we’ll see if that pans out.


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