Day 68 in Japan - Happy Birthday, Dad!

Today is Dad's birthday - I wish I was there to go out to dinner with everyone else, and give him his present (which hasn't been posted yet), but the wonders to Skype make me feel a lot better about not being there.

I was in a bit of a panic this morning as I was leaving for work - I couldn't find my bag with my wallet, phone, ID, money, teaching resources, notebooks, camera and basically my life in it. After a few minutes of frantic looking, I came to the sinking realisation that the last place I had seen it had been in the basket of my bike, which I had left outside overnight. I opened up the the door, and yep, there it was. I can't believe I was that absent-minded! No, not absent-minded - downright stupid. Thankfully this is Japan, so it was still there and completely untouched, but I shudder to think what the implications of me losing all of that stuff would have been.

Best Shimizu teaching day so far - kids were great! AND I HAD MY FIRST SOLO LESSON.  I played hangman for most of the first lesson, because a kid got arrested and teacher had to talk to him. So, we had an impromptu lesson instead of the dry textbook - I wouldn't have been able to pull off the explanations by myself. Thankfully the kids were nice and friendly, and tried really hard to understand me. It would have been nice if the teacher had given me more warning than letting me know as we were unlocking to door to walk into the classroom, but all's well that ends well.

View out of my window at Shimizu prison high school.

Got all sorted out with posters on walls with stamps for kids who participate in class, and got a lot of lesson planning sorted. In my third year culture class, the students were working on projects and I started talking to a few of the girls who were just about finished with time to spare. We started talking about English music, and they sang me "Poker Face" (the Lady Gaga one - there is a song here by a famous artist, but as far as I can tell it's a different song). The lyrics of the chorus, according to the girls, are "Ca ri ma, ca ri ma, carima carima Ca Ri Ma". I ended up singing them the real lyrics (thank you, wasted You Tube hours with Applegirl) in class - there was a full 5 seconds of total silence in the otherwise rowdy classroom when I finished, and all the kids were staring at me. Apparently they think I'm cool now and I was invited to a Lady Gaga concert, a Taylor Swift concert, and one of them wants me to take her if Justin Bieber tours the country. BAAAAAAHHHHHH, I thought I would be able to escape terrible English pop for a year.

I thought I'd try to show you some photos of the classroom at Shimizu - each one of the chairs is normally filled with a student, because I have 40 kids in my class here. Next year, apparently, they will split the classes to teach only 20 at a time, which will be much better for the conversation classes. The kids sit in 6 rows with about 6-7 kids each row. They sit in order of their student number (each class is numbered 1-40), which means that the boys (usually 1-20) are on the right hand side (standing up the front, facing the class right) and the girls (21-40) are on the left hand side. There are two big TVs in the room, which I can hook up to my laptop to show them stuff on the screens, but the teachers really aren't very keen on me using them (they were OK for my self-intro, but when I talked about using them again I got a tilted head, indrawn breath, and a "Hmmmm, chotto...". This means no.)

From the window

What I see each class, without students.

What the kids at the back of the room see.

Today was such a good day that even my usually bad class was good today! Yay!

One of my students waiting to go home at Uozumi train station.
Nice work, iPhone camera!

I spent the evening doing science stuff for Kevin when I got home. Sam went for a big walk, and it was nice to get some alone time, even if it was spent just on science. It is hard to snatch any alone time other than the bike ride to and from work here - all day at school it is a constant stream of students, teachers and classes, and then poor Sam is dying for some company by the time I get home. It was nice of him to get out of the house tonight, and I felt a lot more relaxed for it (or maybe that was just the result of getting Kevin's toxicity data packaged up and sent off?)

Food Highlight of the Day: Frozen icecream/chocolate dessert. Se picture, below, and drool.