It’s nice when the most stressful part of your week is over on Wednesday at 2:05 in the afternoon, but that’s just how my schedule is set up. Every other day of the week is pretty light, with lots of my favorite students in classes that I really enjoy and can show up to without a lot of planning.
Wednesday has one easy class, and three tough ones. These tough classes require a new and original lesson plan each week. Some of the students overlap between two of the classes, so I cannot do the same lesson in all of them. I have lots of ideas for teaching, but week after week it can be tough coming up with things to do. Parts of Monday and Tuesday are used coming up with plans for those classes and talking them over with their respective teachers. The teachers like it because it means that they don’t have to come up with a lecture, and the students like it because they can enjoy my class and don’t have to worry about boring lectures.
So when I’m wrapping up the last class at 2:05 in the afternoon, I’m already starting to think about my weekend plans, and how lucky I am to have such a great job that pays me to live in a foreign country and study Japanese, with the benefit of teaching a bunch of great students who are really happy to talk with me.
After school I went up to the balloon room and helped for about half an hour attaching balloons to chicken wire. The balloon room has much fewer balloons in it, but it’s still impressive to see. One of the girls on the student council was running around in there and it was like a huge mass of blue balloons moving around.
While attaching balloons, I chatted with the students around me in English, and they asked me all sorts of questions about my personal life: Do I have a girlfriend? Is she Japanese? What’s her name? Where did you meet her? How many girlfriends do you have? I answered all the questions as honestly and evasively as I could, but the girls especially were really happy to hear about Kuniko. I didn’t mention that she was a teacher here – that leads to some really tough questions. The girls were saying “Rub, Rub”, which translates to “Love, Love”.
On the way home I shared a train with the student that lives in my neighborhood. Tomorrow he has my class, so he was asking me about the homework and what he should write about. I gave him some pointers – he’s really a good natured kid and I think he’s enjoying my class a lot.
For dinner tonight I unintentionally cooked up a gigantic shrimp, cheese, mushroom, and onion omelette. It was awesome – not healthy, not by a longshot, but it was delicious. I only used three eggs, but somewhere along the way things got out of hand and I had to cut it in half just to fit it on my plate. Lucky I only had a bowl of noodles for lunch.
