I had class today because of “Parent’s Day.” Basically my day consisted of not teaching classes and then sitting in a super long assembly. I had one class to teach and then not classes until after lunch, where I had one class, then we had an assembly for the rest of the day. The assembly was broken into two parts: Student presentations and The Speaker. Most of the parents watched the kid’s part, but during the break between acts they mostly dispersed. Lucky. The speaker talked for an hour and a half. I fell asleep often during his talk. A few of the other teachers did too, as well as most of the students. After school I went home, watched some movies, and had dinner.
Monday
I had no classes to teach today because the kids were studying for an upcoming exam. I spent the first period doing nothing school related, I tried to teach myself Adobe After Effects. It was really hard to learn from just reading, so I decided to wait until I got home and I could watch some YouTube videos about it.
Second period, I went over the lesson I am going to have on Wednesday. It will be a joint teaching effort from both myself and one of the teachers from the middle school. We will be teaching an English class to some sixth year students at the elementary school, to help them prepare to transition to the middle school next year. It’s an “English is fun in middle school!” kind of a thing.
I spent third period revising the PowerPoint presentation for Wednesday, as well as trying to print the slides out. I was unable to because of something I couldn’t understand. I was trying to print using a work computer, but everything is in Japanese so I can’t understand error messages very well.
Fourth period was spent in the teacher’s room doing nothing work. Or little to no work. It depends on what side of perception you’re on, I suppose.
Lunch today smelled really good. They always bring lunch in to the teacher’s room and serve it up for the teacher’s. They also have a faculty member eat a meal before the rest of the school. I’ve heard this is to see if a food-borne illness could affect the entire school.
Looking out the window, staring at the grey skies, noticing the light drizzle, the roof tops, the power lines, and coupling it with the frigid air; memories of my first trip to Japan in the winter of ’91 came rushing back. Along with the memories came a good feeling from the remembrance of such a happy time. : )
Fifth period I taught and then sixth period was free. I spent the remainder of my workday trying to translate five sentences from English to Japanese. It was really hard. I did all five sentences and then asked a teacher if they were right. They weren’t. I then sat at my desk and used Google Translate to check my attempts. I never once got it right on the first try.
I got a new version of Microsoft Word. This new version has an updated spell-checker and it is pissing me off. It is constantly telling me not to use the word “really” as a modifier, not to use the word “basically” to start a sentence, not to use contractions, and for some reason it thinks the single letter “o” is an acceptable word. There are other words it allows when it shouldn’t, but I can’t remember what they are. I usually find them when I am typing too fast and I put a space in the wrong place, breaking up a word. The spell-check doesn’t catch it for some reason. I can understand how using “basically” to start a sentence would be a faux pas, but I’m not doing it constantly, nor am I writing a paper for an institution of higher learning. It recognizes everything else, why can’t it see that? Office 2007 is a humbug.
After work I went home and changed. I was going to a 飲み会(nomikai, Drinking Party) with the elementary school! Yippee!
飲み会 was crazy fun! We went to a really good restaurant that isn’t too far from my house. We had a ton of food:
After dinner, we went to karaoke. I picked the opening song, “Shima Uta” and everybody liked it. We sang and sang.
The only downside to the evening was the constant cigarette smoke. I need to take a shower. Ugh.
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