Today was one of my busy Wednesdays. I had four classes, and then the ESS meeting in the afternoon. The classes went pretty smoothly. The first class was a first year class, and I\u2019ve got that lesson plan so wired into my head that I don\u2019t even refer to my outline and notes anymore. By the end of the lesson, we\u2019ve taught the students how to apologize politely.<\/p>\n
My middle two classes were with the advanced English students. One class is taught by Tsutsumi sensei, and it is 35 boys and 6 girls. The class is pretty active, and the students talk back and forth with the teachers during the lesson, which is a good sign that they aren\u2019t shy about speaking up.<\/p>\n
In contrast, the next class is taught by Yamamoto sensei, and it has 35 girls and 7 boys. The teacher is not the relaxed Yamamoto sensei that is my point of contact at the school – this is another Yamamoto sensei – a kind of hyper-active under-confident English teacher that I have taught with the last few years. He is not confident with his own English, and especially in a situation with a native speaker in front of the top English students he is uncomfortable. He usually hides in the back of the class and clarifies things in Japanese – he tends to stay away from English. The class is quiet because he keeps strict control over utterances. <\/p>\n
My goal today was to create a lesson plan that would draw out Yamamoto sensei and also to create a more lighthearted atmosphere among the quiet students in his class. I managed to get the students to relax a little bit, and I managed to get Yamamoto sensei up to the front of the class to act out a dialog with me, but other than that, it was more of the same. I know the students in that class and they are a lot of fun on their own – they just don\u2019t want Yamamoto sensei to get mad at them so they clam up. <\/p>\n
I have a couple of allies in that class, however: a boy and a girl that are really good at English. They volunteer when I ask questions and they really put in the effort when it matters. I like them a lot, and they have saved my bacon many times by providing answers in an otherwise silent class.<\/p>\n
In a big surprise Kuniko got home at a reasonable hour. We had leftovers from the other night and just sat around relaxing. She played lots of Tetris on the gameboy, and I read a couple more chapters of Cold Mountain. We were both asleep by eleven o\u2019clock in the evening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today was one of my busy Wednesdays. I had four classes, and then the ESS meeting in the afternoon. The classes went pretty smoothly. The first class was a first year class, and I\u2019ve got that lesson plan so wired into my head that I don\u2019t even refer to my outline and notes anymore. By […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-gp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1017\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}