12/10

Friday is high school day.

1st period --- reading test.
Reading test is always easy for me.
I just have to sit there and listen to the kids. One by one they read to me a random paragraph in the textbook.
I don’t understand the point of this test, it doesn’t show their English ability at all.
They get to use their own textbook during the test, so most of them just put katakana spellings on the text to help them read without understanding the text.
A text sample like this:
“Most people here only eat with their hands. I’ve never used my hands to eat curry.”
They would read it like this:
“Mosto peeporu heeya only eato wiz theyya hanzu. I’ve neba usedo my hanzu to eato kali.”
And sometimes for lower level kids, they would read it like this:
“Mosto…… eto….. eto….. wakaranai…… heeya only eato with …. eto…. wakaranai…, I’ve neba used my wakaranai… to eato kali.”


2nd period --- jeopardy game…
except the projector wasn’t working. So… the PowerPoint slides that I prepared was a waste. I can’t use what I had prepared, so I had to come up with a new activity in class…
Grammar point was “What’s this?” “It’s…..”
I just wrote some random Chinese words on the board for them to guess.

3rd period --- went well :]

4th period --- the kids wouldn’t shout up again.

+

I went back to the office after having the lunch at school.
AND…I have nothing to do for the rest of the day.
Even if there’s nothing to do, people here like to pretend that they are busy.
I am so bad at pretending to be busy.

People here work really slowly because they don’t have enough jobs to do, yet they want to look busy. Such as take 4 hours to coloring 3 worksheets… or take 2 hours to cut out 30 name cards. Instead of using cutters, people like to use scissors, the slow way.
For the same job, I could finish it in 3 minutes and then they would say to me, “wow!!! You are so fast” and then I would have no jobs, AND THEN they would think “she is so lazy, she is not doing anything.”
“Efficiency” just doesn’t exist here.

12/9

Elementary day today.
It was an easy day today. Only 2 lessons.
Taught the 3rd graders directions; left and right.

First, we taught them bunny hop dance.
Left, left, right, right, left, right, jump jump jump.
The kids were just crazy. They wouldn’t stop talking and moving around.
It took us a long time to teach them the simple steps. And most kids, they can’t even differentiate left and right.
Finally, they learnt the steps, so we wanted to dance with the music on, but the CD player was broken… We gave up with the CD player… and danced with no music.

After the warm up, we played the coin game and the twister game.
Kids got really excited about the twister game.
At the end we only got to play 2 rounds of twister game, and then ended the lesson early because kids were out of control.

We had the same lesson again in the 3rd period. The kids in the 3rd period were much better behaved.

+

Today’s school lunch menu was:
Mushroom pasta
Bread with fruit and cream filling
Corn soup
Milk

It is always better if we got served our lunch from the staff room, because we would always get a bigger portion.
But at Suyoshi, our lunch is always served in class by the students.
Even though I love the menu today, I only got served with a tiny portion and weren’t able to ask for a 2nd serve.