Friday, April 22, 2011

The Weekend is here!

Today is Friday! Thank goodnesss!!!!!!! I had been waiting all week for the weekend...as bad as that sounds. But I think it's partly a case of Spring Fever! The weather has been getting better recently and it always looks so nice outside. I don't want to have to worry about anything except enjoying time outside and being able to go out and explore. But I know that I obviously have some work to do...but right now I'd rather go out and play if I can!

Well I had all 6 classes today....so I am very tired! But since it's the weekend, I don't mind and am happy! Today wasn't too bad. It's still early in the lessons so it's all very basic stuff. Greetings, how to say "My name is, Hello, etc." and the alphabet. I guess I really only had 2 lesson plans today....one for the 5th graders and one for the 6th graders. It just gets tiring when I have to keep on doing the same lesson throughout the day. Doing it once isn't bad...but when I have to do one lesson 3 times it gets old and tiring. One advantage is that by the 2nd and 3rd time, I know it so well that I don't need any notes and I know how to time everything so that it fits in with the class schedule and time.

But my funny story for the day comes with my 2nd period class. The students in this class are all good and they are very interested in English. There is one pupil in particular who is kind of an oddball, but very funny. He asks me all these different types of questions that no 5th grader in the world should be asking me. Economic policy, dollar and Yen exchange rates, the number of nuclear power plants and factories in America....the list goes on. I don't know what kind of news he watches or where he gets information from, but he is always very interested in this kind of stuff and it surprises me how much he knows! Well, aside from asking all these questions all the time, he is very good at participating in class and is very involved. So normally at the beginning of class I will go around class and ask people, "How are you?" A very basic greeting and one that they are all used to. So most people will answer with "I'm fine, I'm hungry" or something of the like. But this one child in particular likes to be a part of the class and answered, "I'm GREAT hungry and GREAT happy!"

Of course I chuckled at this and found it very entertaining. This was his response 2 weeks ago when I was teaching the class. At that time, I had told him to replace the "GREAT" with "VERY" and that would be a much better and clearer answer to the question which would make sense. So he took note...but obviously forgot today. He shouted out the "I'm GREAT hungry and GREAT happy!" in front of the whole class. So again, myself as well as the students had corrected him to replace the "GREAT" with "VERY" as the others had remembered this. And so then he goes on to ask me how to say "hazukashii" in English, which would be "embarrassed." So he went on to answer my "How are you?" question with, "I'm GREAT embarrassed!"..............then he corrected himself and said "No! I'm VERY embarrassed!"


hahahahahha! I was laughing pretty hard at this point and I know the homeroom teacher and other students had a good kick out of the whole episode. Ahh..this kid is hilarious and made my day. It was really funny and as long as he doesn't keep putting the "GREAT" in front of everything, I'll be happy. Hopefully by the end of the year he will be using the adjectives correctly!

On another note, there was another aftershock last night. I can't count how many aftershocks there have been over the past several weeks since the large earthquake on March 11th. Last night's happened while I was in the best place possible to be during an earthquake.....the SHOWER! Haha, I was washing my hair at the time and I thought...."am I scrubbing my head so hard that the whole room is shaking or is this.....ohhh an earthquake!" I looked over at the shampoo bottles and they were shaking back and forth, so I knew it wasn't just my imagination playing with me. I immediately hopped out of the shower and turned on the tv to see the severity of this one. It wasn't too bad....but it was an earthquake right next to Chiba. Luckily, there was no tsunami warning and I was lucky that the power, water, and heater were all intact since I was in the shower. It would have been bad if it wasn't since I was still in the shower when it happened....I might have been stuck with shampoo residue in my hair if the water was cut for some reason during the earthquake!

Well, I'm going to go enjoy my weekend now!!!

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