The second beautiful day in row… it was pretty difficult to go to school today. The weather has been hovering at about 77 degrees Fahrenheit, with very low humidity. I get a lot of pleasure out of telling people at school that this is common weather for California.
I had four classes today, and a Japanese class from Mr. Hayashi. My classes went fairly well, and the students were pretty enthusiastic. My last class was taught by the student teacher, and this time there were a bunch of English teachers in the back observing. She had me stand up in front of the class with her, but only asked me to do one or two pronunciations the whole time. I did my best to look eager and ready to do anything, but later one of the teachers watching said that I looked bored. I hope that didn’t reflect poorly on our student teacher.
After school we had a meeting where we all gave our comments to the teacher. It was a strange meeting in that it was held mostly in Japanese, but these odd little phrases in English would pop up. From what I could tell with my limited Japanese ability was that they felt there was a lot of room for improvement. My name came up quite a bit, so I think that they may have wanted her to use me more. It costs a lot of money to fly a foreigner all the way to Japan, put them up in an apartment, and pay them a salary every month. To just use me for a couple of sentences probably isn’t a good use of a resource.
Anyway, I gave my comments, in English, but it was strange. What do I know? I have no formal training, and if I was this poor lady I would be taking what I said with a grain of salt. Some punk from California wants to tell me how to teach?
After the meeting another student teacher invited me to observe her P.E. class. She had a dazed expression, like she had been standing too close to a bomb blast or something. Unfortunately, I had another class so I couldn’t attend.
On the way home I happened to be leaving at the same time as one of the ESS members, Harada-san. We walked to the train station together – normally she rides her bike but because of the rainy season, she’s using the train every day. We spoke lots of English the whole time – it was good practice for her.
Tomorrow is my “Anything” classes, and Mr. Yamamoto said that he’d like to go outside for our classes. I’m trying to come up with some activities right now for things to do while outside. It’ll be nice to take advantage of this great weather!
