Day 97 in Japan - Happy Halloween!

Today's classes ran really well. I had my first first fully, completely, really alone lesson, where I actually had to teach the kids a proper lesson that they will be tested on. Eek! It went quite smoothly. I think I need to start stuffing these up, or more teachers are going to decide that they can happily leave me to my own devices on class.

Found out today that I have to go to a mid-year seminar in the middle of Mum and Dad's visit. I shouldn't have to stay overnight, but it will probably mean a few early mornings and late nights while they are here. And I'll probably miss any fun after parties as well. Boo.

English journal marking all afternoon in my free periods - I am trying to write at least a page reply to all of the students who wrote to me. There were more than expected, and while it's quite nice and fun to read all the the students' favourite foods and places in Japan, it is difficult trying to not repeat myself too much in my replies. Apparently a lot of the kids like Hokkaido, Okinawa and Kyoto the best, and I'm trying to think of new things to say about them in each reply.

After school, we had the long-anticipated ESS HALLOWEEN PARTY! Yeah, I partied with 15-16 year old Japanese school kids. That's pretty hardcore. I wasn't sure what to expect, so I turned up with only chocolate, thinking that the kids would prefer to just hang out and talk and eat, but in the end I ran back to my office to print off a heap of Halloween word puzzles and games. Lucky I had spent some time gathering resources. We played a Halloween version of Battleships which saw them practising "Does Bill like Spiders" (Grid reference: Bill and Spiders), "Yes, he does" (Hit) / "No, he doesn't" (Miss), and some Find-A-Words and other word puzzles. And we ate a LOT of junk food. It was surprisingly fun, and we made a lot of jokes (anime character impressions, Dasshutsu Escape game jokes and gently making fun of the boys).

This is the process that we use to make decisions about groups in ESS club -
you write all the people's names up the top, and then the categories
along the bottom. Then start at the person, and draw a
line taking every cross path you come across until you hit the bottom.

Team "Star Chips" versus Team "Hyaku-en shop"
FIGHT!

Then home, quite late. Summary of night: Community, scribblenauts, study, kotatsu, preparation of mashup karaoke. Wait, let me elaborate on that last one. Sam and I really like a mashup of Take Your Mama, No One, Respect (George Michael) and Respect (Aretha Franklin). The original (by DJ Earworm) can be found here. So, we decided to spend about 3 hours tonight trying to figure out an arrangement that we can do at karaoke. Yeah, we are THAT nerdy. But if you are reading this then you probably already know that. I am pretty happy with what we came up with, but we need to practise before we make our public debut.

Food Highlight of the Day: Cooked-from-scratch spaghetti sauce (although we couldn't find any tomato paste, so we had to improvise).