Today I kicked off my new lesson on music, and I have to say that it worked pretty well. I’ve built in some precautions to make sure that I don’t get bored with the lesson, and there is also some inherent randomness in my system, so things stay interesting. I’m always pumped on the first day of a new lesson – hopefully this one will keep my interest through the next two weeks.
I printed up a big list of music for the students to choose from, and then they actually do a music review of three songs. They have about thirty to choose from, and I tried to do a wide selection of genres so that it isn’t just pop music, which is very popular here.
I’ve set it up so that I can choose songs for them to review or they can, depending on how I think the class is going. In the classes that were excited, I let them choose. There was a big fight in my last class on who got to request a song – one of the guys that usually sleeps through class was wide awake and making requests.
Other classes were quiet and afraid to make a request. In those cases, I picked the songs or had the Japanese teacher pick the song. At one point I had the whole class listening to Corrosion of Conformity. It’s a metal band I really like (here’s a clip of one of their songs). The class sits in stunned silence and then almost everyone writes a scathing review. One student really liked it, though. We talked about his other favorite bands after class.
After school I made the long journey to Nishinomiya Kitaguchi to get my camera back from Antoine. He had taken tons of pictures at the car show, and once I looked at the pictures he took I realized why he went. Here’s a sample:
I think I got the ratio about right – he had 28 megabytes worth of girls and cars from the Osaka car show. Antoine is actually a big car fan, and he runs a big Mazda bulletin board website. Still, most of the pictures were girls, and that shows you exactly where Antoine’s mind is these days. Not that I’m complaining, really.
I had to get the camera back because I’m planning a solo trip to Kyoto tomorrow. I’m going to hit a few shrines that I’ve heard good things about, so it should be fun. I’m staying up late tonight getting ready, and then I’ll sleep in a bit tomorrow and head out. Tomorrow is Foundation Day, a national holiday. I should have some great pictures from Kyoto posted here soon.
