Kuniko was driving into work today, and so she gave me a ride as far as Sannomiya. That gave me the opportunity to ride an earlier train, and I showed up at work around 7:20, astonishing all the teachers. It is amazing how conditioned everyone is to “The foreigner always rolls in as late as possible”.
Out of the six class periods we had today, I had five classes. I did my self introduction five times, and tried to entertain the students. I think it went pretty well, and everyone seemed comfortable with me at the end of class. Hopefully we’ll build up some rapport over the next few months. I met a few students who had exceptionally high levels of English, so I’m going to try to remember them and encourage them to keep studying.
With so many classes, I don’t really have very many stories to tell. Almost as soon as I finished my last class I had to answer some questions for Harada sensei. She asked me to tell her some jokes, because she likes to learn English that way. I told her the first one that came to mind, an old one about a guy named “Bernie Schwartz”. It went pretty well, and I had to retell the first part to make sure the punchline came through. Now I have to think of another (clean) joke to tell her.
I’m back home and getting ready to go into the kitchen and make tacos for dinner. It’s been a while, and I’ve been seriously craving tacos lately. I found out that the Jusco supermarket across the street stocks salsa, so that was a big score. That and 99 yen avocados.
