Way back when I first started teaching at my high school I had a problem student in one of my classes. He put almost no effort into the class, and worse, he distracted other students from my lesson. I talked with him in an effort to make him do his work, and a couple of times I was ready to really get pissed off at this guy.
This year he’s my best friend. Now that he’s been promoted to second year, I teach him every week – twice as much as last year. I don’t know where it started, but I talked with him in the hallway in Japanese once, and ever since he’s been really interested in me. He asks me about my diet, he helps me study Japanese, and he’s attentive in class.
I feel like somehow I’ve gotten through to him. Most of the time he only speaks Japanese, but now he works without distracting other students and he’ll even say something to other students if they start acting up in my class.
I had four classes today – three of which were my “Anything” classes. I tried some new activities out today. One was an activity where I read a story out loud in English, and the students drew what I described on a piece of paper. It actually worked out better than I expected. Once I wrote out the English on the blackboard the students were all comparing pictures and laughing at the differences and the artwork. I got a lot of satisfaction out of that – I’m glad they enjoyed it.
Another new activity I did was invite everyone to the front of the class. I dumped out a big bag of junk on the desk, and told everyone about them. I had a stick of deodorant in the bag, which caused a lot of excitement. I explained what it was and pantomimed putting some on under my arms. On the students opened it up and you should have seen the expression on his face when he smelled it – like someone had just farted. No wonder deodorant isn’t popular here.
I dropped in on a P.E. class playing ping pong in the gym. Their teacher is a new one this year, Mr. Arai. He’s a P.E. teacher and he looks the part. He talks in a booming voice, wears track suits all the time, and is the alpha male of the first year teachers. I chatted with him and found out that he knows quite a bit of English.
The short version of his story is that he went to Croatia for a year to study handball ten years ago. Handball is a completely different sport here in Japan – it looks like a lot more fun than the health club version back home. Anyway, we chatted for a long time and he seemed really nice. My first impression of him was a giant Y-chromosome in gym pants, but as is usually the case, there’s a lot more to the guy than what you see.
The weather in Kansai made a pleasant change and now it’s nice and cool, with almost no humidity. Antoine and I were joking about it on the phone tonight – all these changes in weather are so much more dramatic than what we’re used to in SoCal.
Mr. Hayashi had the urge to leave early today, and I had to do some shopping for ESS, so we decided to split. We are each other’s perfect alibi. If we leave together someone always thinks that there is some kind of menial task that I need help with, and we’re out of there. Mr. Hayashi lives for this kind of stuff.
Tonight I cooked some pork with a Thai chili marinade that came out pretty good – maybe a bit too much peanut butter, so I’ll know for next time. I did about forty minutes of studying, but I almost fell asleep in my chair, so I’m off to bed. It’ll be nice to sleep tonight with the cool weather.
