Mori Sensei Revisited

It was hard getting my tired body out of bed early this morning. There’s been lots of running around this weekend, and it caught up with me at 5 a.m. when the alarm went off.

Luckily at school I had only one class, and an afternoon meeting. I spent the day relaxing at my desk and doing Japanese listening drills in my classroom. Normally I would spend some of this free time planning my next first year lesson, but after the last time when I went to all the trouble last time only to have it slashed by Mori sensei, I decided to see how the meeting goes.

I was all ready for my class to show up, and the bell rang, and nobody came. I waited a few minutes because maybe they were coming from a PE class, and they were changing out of uniforms, but… no luck.

That’s a tough time – you start to doubt whether you have the correct info – what’s really happening? I ran down to the staff room and couldn’t find my teaching partner for the class, Nozaki sensei. There were no changes on the schedule, so what was going on?

Finally I went up to the homeroom class of the students I was supposed to teach, and by chance Nozaki sensei came flying out of the classroom having just realized the class was in the wrong place. She apologized like crazy until we got to the classroom with the students, and she was apologizing pretty much all day after that. She’s a new teacher, though, and it’s to be expected.

The meeting with Mori sensei went as I kind of expected. She laid out what she wanted to do, but this time I just went along with everything she said. She had a couple of activities that concerned me a little bit, but this lesson I’ll hold my tongue and see how it turns out.

During Mori sensei’s self-introduction to our class, she makes a point of mentioning how many countries that she has visited (and it’s quite a lot), and then at the end she switches to Japanese and apologizes to the students that maybe her Japanese language isn’t so polished since she has been speaking so much English these days.

The reality is that she is really uncomfortable using English, and she keeps trying to switch to Japanese to explain things. I try to hold her to English though. Today she was trying to explain a passage in the textbook that was written in Japanese. She had some trouble, and so she said that since I can probably read the Japanese I should read it later. I smiled and told her that my job at the school is not just to improve the students’ English – I’m here to get the teachers using it too. That kind of flustered her a bit, but my feeling is that if you are going to talk the talk, you gotta be able to walk the walk. Or something like that.

As you can probably see I’m not a big Mori sensei fan. Luckily I’ll only have to work with her until summertime and then I’ll be out of there. I feel sorry for the poor soul who takes over for me. But maybe a little structure early on might help my replacement get started on the right foot.

Tonight we’re taking it easy and ordering in pizza for dinner. Kuniko is even more exhausted than I am, so hopefully we’ll have a low impact evening and be ready for tomorrow.


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