Day 101 in Japan - LOL! (101!)

This week's first year (16 year olds) lessons at Akashi kita are with the "B classes". The Japanese school system does a lot of ranking students based on their prowess, and making sure that they know exactly where they stand in relation to others. The "A classes" are the top 20 students at English in each class, and the B class is full of the bottom 20 students. The B classes are generally a little ahrder, because I can't use as much English in the classes, and everything goes just a little bit slower. Thankfully, I normally start each of my lessons with the A classes, so I go through each class 9 times with the better students, and by the time I get to the less English-y classes, I know the harder bits, what things need to be emphasised, and what can be brushed over. But I'm still a bit weirded out by the whole "you aren't as good as the others, so you are in the crap class" concept - it's nice to be able to give slightly more difficult lessons to challenge the better kids without alienating the students who would be confused, but it's a bit sad when you see kids who are clearly quite good at English but bad at tests stuck in the worse classes and starting to give up.

I had the second half of he student self introduction lessons today with my lovely 1-9 science class. The students had to choose their "characteristic" from a bunch of English adjectives, and then come up with a few episodes to demonstrate why they believe that the desription fits. There were some brilliant talks! A lot of kids described themselves as "sctive, prgressive, enthusiatic" etc. - some really nice positive talks. There were a few really interesting descriptions chosen when the kids decided to choose something no on the list - one girl described herself as "unbalanced", a boy was "easily moved to tears", another boy was "not at all artistic", and one interesting speech was a boy who described himself as an "enthusiastic fan of Key" (an animation studio). I had a great time in these lessons, and I hope the kids had anywhere near as much fun as I did.

I was a bit more nervous than usual before all of my classes today, because it was "watch your children's lessons day" at my school. Thankfully, I didn't have any interested parents sitting in on the English classes (phew), but a few other teachers came into my lessons, which netter me a few compliments. This included the one token really good looking male teacher (at our school he is a maths teacher), which made me nervous and I tripped in class. Again. I think the students are used to it by now. It worked really well in this class, because we are doing "What's the Matter?" lessons - lessons about feeling sick and going to the doctor - so I got to use one of the key phrases ("I have a sore wrist"), and I got advice off the kids ("You should get an X-ray"). Worked brilliantly, but I still fell on my arse in front of the good looking guy.

Today after school, Sam and I did a lot of Japanese study. The new correspondence CLAIR course is OK - much better than the materials we got before we came to Japan. I was very good and did a lot of study before I started watching TV. Woo!

Food Highlight of the Day: Bento lunch was a special autumn edition - tempura pumpkin, chesnut, and sweet potato. That's what the Japanese version of autumn vegetables are.