Today was quite a crazy day, full of surreal moments. It rained all night last night, and so I was prepared in the morning to walk off to the train station. I grabbed my big umbrella, wore my rain paints and coat, and even put on my hiking boots. The biggest trick was managing the umbrella while I carried all my gear wrapped in plastic bags, too.
The rain wasn’t ralling down too hard really, it was just the strong wind that accompanied it. I constantly had to turn my umbrella around to keep it from blowing away. Unfortunately the wind was swirling so fast that it pushed my umbrella inside out, and twisted and broke the metal braces to keep it together. It was a sorry looking umbrella by the time that I arrived at school.
Mr. Hayashi and I worked out the details of my tutoring sessions – we are going to do them on Mondays and Fridays, starting this week. I’m really happy about this arrangement – it will give me a chance to upgrade my Japanese even more.
I had four classes today, and they were all pretty good. All my classes today were in the student’s classrooms, rather than mine. Usually the teachers wander up there during the 10 minute break between classes and wait for the bell to ring. I’ve been doing that and now I’ve noticed that students that are normally shy will come out and talk to me. I had some good conversations today – some kids were really nice and I think they surprised themselves how well they speak and understand English when the pressure is off.
Two of my classes are with Mr. Yamamoto, who is a big music fan. He was asking all about Radiohead the last couple classes, so this time I brought in a CD with two Radiohead songs and we listened to them in the classroom. The students really enjoyed it, mainly because it gave them four or five minutes where they were sure they weren’t going to get called on.
The best part was the sight of all the students, their heads bent over studying the lyric sheet, and the sound of Radiohead playing through the whole classroom and drifting down the hallway to the other rooms.
An informal poll found that mostly girls liked Radiohead, and the boys didn’t like it. There were exceptions on both sides. As I walked by students writing about the music some had written “I don’t like this music” – but when Mr. Yamamoto asked them to read their sentence out loud they changed it to “Good music”. My theory is that they didn’t want to hurt my feelings. I was just happy to see them change the sentence on the fly – that’s quick English for you.
Mr. Hayashi mentioned that there is another student that is interested in joining ESS. Guess what – it’s a boy! Unbelievable! Astonishing! The end of the world is near! This is only the second boy I’ve heard of joining ESS in the whole JET program. I haven’t met him yet, but I have a feeling it’s the boy that I talked to the other day that had an American accent. He was pretty excited about English. Wait until the girls get ahold of him.
The rain cleared up around lunchtime, but the wind just kept blowing. On the way home I stopped in Befu to pick up some printer ink cartridges and I bought a burger at MOS Burger while I was there. The burger took longer to make than it did to eat, and as I got up and left people stared at me like I had just did a magic trick. Granted, the burgers are pretty small around here. I can’t wait to get my hands on an In-and-Out Burger.
Right now I’m home typing away. The wind outside is blowing furiously, what they might call gale force winds back home. Every now and then some big noise happens outside from something blowing over. All my stuff is secure outside, so I’m going to cuddle up with a movie I downloaded and relax tonight.
