The environment of a junior high school classroom in Japan is pretty active. Students get up and sit down throughout the class. At the beginning especially they are difficult to get settled down, and you’ll sometimes have students going over to open and close the windows and the curtains many times depending on their own personal comfort level. Then there’s the goofing off, the pencils dropping on the floor twice a minute, and the rubber bands being shot while the teacher isn’t looking.
All this activity can make for some pretty casual teaching plans. Some of my teachers like it organized, but even the most organized teaching plan isn’t remotely as structured as my high school lessons were. With high school there is more on the line, more things to cover, and students have outgrown all the little quirks that make teaching in junior high so unpredictable.
When I taught in a high school, I used to plan classes down to five minute increments. This five minutes is for greetings and questions, this fifteen minutes is for a listening activity, etc, etc. In my school now it’s a completely different story. For planning I usually plan two big activities, or a set of three smaller ones. Things take unusual turns so often that you can’t make a tight plan and hope it works out.
Making leisurely plans and following them loosely is a new experience for me, but I find that I like it more. The students obviously take more time to pick things up and so you’ve got to be able to adapt to the situation and change things that aren’t working. It also makes me a little more flexibile, which is always a good thing.
Kuniko and I are enjoying the warm environment of our place, thanks to the kerosene heater. We had two electric blankets last night, one for each of us, and I slept soundly.
Tomorrow we are going to go see an exhibition of Pixar artwork that is being displayed at the museum in Kobe. It’s only 1000 yen, and it might be fun to see some of the original art before it hit the screen. I really liked the style of the work at Pixar, especially in the movie “The Incredibles”. I’m hoping to see a lot more of that when we go tomorrow.
