Wednesday, May 16, 2007

English Conversation Circle (ECC)

I had a really nice time at ECC this week. I spent a lot of time talking with Yuuya Matsumoto. I had him last year in my M1 class. He came today and we talked one-on-one for a while about what's been going on.

I had a great time gossiping with him. He told me how Kazushi threw an eraser at Shunpei's head last week during math class. It started a stir and they threw punches until another student broke them up. I don't think the math teacher knew what was going on.

Then Takahiro cut another student's pencil bag and his pencils dumped out. I guess the teacher thought it was so funny, he wasn't able to really scream at him. But, Takahiro got it today from one of the teachers.

These guys are the sweat-hogs for sure. Yuuya was cracking up the entire time. I couldn't help myself either. He's a great character.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Rough Start

Ugh, it was a freaking rough morning. First, I didn't get much sleep. I had a few stress dreams about going back to school. Then, I had to go in early to print out worksheets for my first period class. They took a long time to print so I wasn't able to get enough copies. On top of that, I didn't estimate correctly how many copies I needed in the first place.

I should have taken more time to warm up with the Ss since we just came back from a week long vacation. I didn't have time, so I dove into the lesson plan.

After that, I had problems with the DVD player. I had to wait for the FBI warnings, then I almost broke the plug after knocking it out of the socket, and ultimately had problems with the subtitling. The students were reading the "director's comments" in Japanese for about five minutes before I noticed that they didn't look right. I finally got the subtitles dialed in and we successfully watched the first part of the movie.

Finally, the Ss really dragged their feet on the classwork. All they had to do was look at a comic and write some dialog for a couple of the scenes from the movie they just watched. They weren't very creative and only a few Ss produced more than four out of six sentences. It was a bloody start to the final run to the end of the semester.