I was up on and off throughout the evening with pain in my shoulder and some good bruises tattooed there. Fortunately, the pain isn’t as bad as last year, so I should be OK by the end of this week.
Today I would normally do lots of studying, since I have only one class on Mondays. Instead I spent the whole day on preparation for the rest of the week. I prepared for today’s class, and also I did prepwork for two other classes on Wednesday. As a result I am feeling pretty guilty about not studying even one word of Japanese today. Maybe later tonight I’ll succumb and memorize some words.
My class today was a new lesson on ordering in a restaurant. I wanted to make it a fun lesson, so I pushed two desks together, put a tablecloth over them, lit a candle and set two places with a couple of teacups instead on wineglasses. It was the first thing students saw when they came in and they were all impressed. I was hoping that feeling would last through the lesson, and remarkably, it did. They tried their best and later when I had them dressed up as waiters delivering imaginary food they hung in there and did a pretty good job.
I spent some time talking with one of the office ladies while we were copying things in the copy room – she told a great story about her niece who is getting married to an English guy. She had them over for a get together along with a bunch of other family, and it amounted to almost 20 people. For a Japanese household, that’s pretty big. She commented that this gentleman’s disposition was much different from mine – she said that I am always bright, cheerful and outgoing when she sees me, and this guy seemed kind of quiet and introspective. He’s planning on bringing his Japanese wife back with him to England next year. It was a nice, kind of unintentional compliment from somebody I don’t normally speak with very often.
Today I had a really good time with my students, especially the third years who were hanging around the staffroom after class. We joked about this and that, mostly in English, and seeing how relaxed they are with me reminds me how soon it will be that I’ll have to start over making some new students comfortable. I was thinking more and more that I can’t imagine doing something else besides teaching. Maybe I am just in a great situation now – if I had unenthusiastic students would I still like teaching? That’s going to be a big question for me as I get ready to change jobs soon.
I’m sure I’ll have more deep thoughts about this later on, but for right now everything is going just fine.
