Wacky Wednesday

(Funny moments included) Today was good. The more I teach with Hashimoto-先生, the more I appreciate his work ethic. He was the one who intimidated me at first. :) His students are very well-behaved and quiet and follow directions well. It's interesting to see what parts of a teacher's personality seep into their classes. :)

Today I taught numbers. For my warm-up I played the first couple lines of "One," by Three Dog Night. I think it was a great warm-up and the kids were able to guess what we were practicing today.

After that lesson I taught first graders who are a week behind and did the personal information lesson. It went very well! (I also collected papers from these classes and wrote on all of them.)

Then came my PE class. I scaffolded the crap outta that worksheet so they could be successful and it worked!! I had MUCH more participation today and students who had never done anything were involved today. It was am amazing feeling. Not everyone is on board yet, but many more are! Yes! We did a lesson on comparatives and superlatives. One student, during our baseballs game (first base was the root word, second base comparative, third base superlative, and to make a home run you needed to use one of those three words in a sentence.) chose a 2 point word. The 2 point words were all regular words but they were ones not found on the worksheet. Team 1 played it safe the first two rounds then during round 3 they picked a 2 pointer. Their sentence was "I am the deepest person in te world!" So great! Another student, while said this, "I am as crazy as my .. No, no number 3! I am as crazy as you!" *points directly at me. I laughed and enthusiastically said, "Same amount of crazy!? Great!!" For a kid who wouldn't participate at all the previous lessons... Please make fun of me! Speak to me in English! I love it! I bet he won't soon forget it either. :)

It was after the bell that I got these sentences so I wasn't able to gather that class's worksheets but I asked the JTE to do so and she's going to give them to me tomorrow. :) then untaught another numbers lesson and picked up more worksheets. I wrote on 120 papers today! I'm hoping the personal encouragement will help them feel successful and love English even more.

Oh man... So, I found out my class on Monday with Fujieda-先生 is cancelled because the BOE (Board of Education) is coming to observe her. I said ok and that was that. THEN Oikawa-先生comes by and says, I want you to teach the first half of the class and probably two men from the BOE will be there." Oh, ok.. No pressure. Lol I'm not too worried about it - but a little worry exists!

Today was super humid during the day - the evening is very nice (much cooler). I'm planning on helping with the Eikawa (English classes) at the church. Wish me luck - I had "magnet head" again today. When the exhaustion hit it almost knocked my head off my shoulders! I just felt like collapsing! Like one of those toys that you press the button and they fall into a small pile of body parts. That's what I felt like today!

I had one piece of caffeine gum leftover from my period so I grabbed that and worked on planning. I felt awake and alive for about an hour then magnet-headness came back. Awww :/ hopefully I can figure out whatever is causing this and make it stop! I slept better last night than I have recently - and even woke to my alarm rather than early... Hmm ... Anyway ... I'm on the bus now - I wanted to get a picture but there's another passenger :/ another time! So you can see a Japanese bus. I prefer to type my blog as it's much faster but I did this to give me extra motivation for that long bike ride to the church tonight. (I wish they could have the classes closer to me - I want to help, I'm just so tired and it's so dark and sketchy out and the church is so far from me - makes me nervous :/) in any case, love you all very much! XOXO, A