Today was my first full day back at school. It was a little hard to get used to sticking around for the whole day, after a whole summer of abbreviated workdays. All the students were in today, but they didn’t have classes – just a couple of homerooms, a cleaning session, and a long ceremony full of speeches and sub-ceremonies.
I worked for about an hour of my day on class preparation. I chatted with various people for about an hour. The rest of my day was studying Japanese. I’m hitting the books hard in preparation for the big test in December, and today was pretty useful. Japanese adverbs are pretty tough to get my brain around.
Around four o’clock teachers started sneaking out – it’s their last day to do so before school really starts. I had plans to meet my new Japanese tutor at 5 p.m., so I just watched them go. I swear they even looked a little guilty.
I met my new teacher, Tsuji-san, outside the gates to my school. She lives right across the street, so it’s easy to drop by when I get off work. I’ll be visiting for about an hour and a half each week on Monday. She’s a private English teacher, and she’s hoping to pick up some American English from me. In fact, we worked out an arrangement where we would switch languages back and forth, and that way I don’t have to pay her for her time.
We sat in a very Japanese style room, surrounded by kids books since she teaches elementary school and junior high school students part time. Her English is quite good, better than some of our teachers. She’s 31, and got her major in Portuguese. She is also studying Spanish, as well as English. I wish I could remember some more of the Spanish that I knew, but so much is gone. Maybe I’ll pick up a Spanish textbook sometime and see what happens.
Anyway, we spent about an hour and a half chatting, and during that time her father and mother made an appearance to say hello. The mother brought two iced coffees for us to drink while we were working, and some assorted chocolates to snack on. Wow! I think it will be useful to be there, since my YMCA classes are ending soon.
I had a semi-traditional Japanese dinner tonight, rice and some green vegetables and Nagano chili peppers soaked in some soy sauce. To make it more non-traditional I had a side of kimchee with it. Tomorrow is my first class, and then on Friday I get really busy.
