So today I had a full day of class...well pretty much full! I had 5 out of 6 class periods to teach today. I had 3 out of 4 classes in the morning and the 2 classes in the afternoon. Today, I had taught with the regular English teachers. It has been awhile...I mentioned in previous posts that there were student teachers at my school doing a live rotation in a middle school as they prepare to become teachers after they graduate from school. So I haven't taught with the regular English teachers for nearly 3 and a half weeks. It's been awhile!!
So the title of my blog today is 懐かしい (natsukashii) which in Japanese means, "It's been a long time" or "this takes me back." That's kind of how I felt today. I hadn't taught with the teachers in awhile that I kind of forgot the feeling of teaching with a real English teacher for middle school! But it was a good feeling, I guess. Although it was fun teaching with student teachers who are more my age, it's good to be teaching with the teachers who have the experience and who actually run the class. They have more control over the class and all the students know that they can't get away with as much as they might have been able to with a student teacher in the front.
Another 懐かしい moment came for me tonight at my Eikaiwa class. Tonight I taught a "Holiday Lesson" based on some pre-Christmas things and Thanksgiving. I mainly taught about the Thanksgiving Holiday and how we celebrate it in America. I even gave a mini history lesson giving the details on the origins of Thanksgiving and why we celebrate it. More than an English teacher, right?! Haha....
Well, besides Thanksgiving being 懐かしい for me, I showed an episode of FRIENDS because they have many Thanksgiving episodes. I don't personally own any seasons of FRIENDS, but there's a DVD rental place that I went to and they had most of the episodes there. I like the tv show a lot and watching it again reminded me of America. I forgot how funny the show is and how much I enjoy all the characters in it. So I had a really good time watching it again in my class tonight and being reminded of American sitcoms.
Prior to the class, I was playing with the rental DVD on my computer so that I could be all set when I wanted to show the episode to the class. However, I ran into one problem while trying to play it on my computer...I forgot about the different region codes!! Yeah, this could set me back a little bit! Well, I tried a lot of different things, like trying to open it up differently or playing it in Windows Media Player Classic, but still no luck. Well, you can only change the region code on DVD players 4 or 5 times for the lifetime of the machine, and I definitely did NOT want to do that!
Luckily, a friend of mine had put a different media player on my computer back in Minnesota that can play all sorts of different media, including those from a foreign country! I found this out tonight and was in luck! That way, I didn't have to worry about the different region code or about not being able to show the episode. Thank goodness! I guess I'm thankful for that! Haha! Well, long story short, I found out that I am able to play different DVDs from different regions on my computer and that makes me a happy camper!! All in all, there were many 懐かしい moments in my day and I'm sure there will be many more to come as I spend more time here in Japan. Everyday is a new adventure!
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