Not bad for the start of the week

I had a surprisingly good morning yesterday. Monday morning, didn’t really feel like going to work, ‘specially since the teachers had told me (Friday afternoon 2 hours before I was due to leave) that I would be teaching the first class and could you please prepare something. Yay. Feel the joy.

Anyways, managed to pull something half-decent out of my last 2 hours, left it on my desk and enjoyed my weekend.

Back to work, I was slightly dreading the first class as I always have a sinking feeling when I am about to teach that I am going to mess up in unimaginable ways and kids will think my lessons are boring and can’t we just do bloody grammar already. I really should give myself more credit than that.

After the usual blank stares when I am at the front of the class and not the teacher (and they realize therefore this will NOT be translated in Japanese) class slowly settled into a routine that worked. We were doing “Emotions”. So I would say the word and then exaggeratedly perform the emotion in front of my students. As I said, after the blank stares stopped, I think they enjoyed it! I often got laughs here and there and they enjoyed trying to guess the emotion I was portraying during the review.

And after a bit of coaxing, I had my class clown take my place and perform an emotion. Now Japanese students are really shy usually, but after a moment’s hesitation, he took the plunge and just had fun trying to make the others guess how he was feeling. I think this lesson went really well and I was really happy that my students enjoyed it. It made me realize that I miss teaching a bit more than I actually thought.

This job can be cool when I’m not doing an impression of a tape-recorder. Doing an impression of me laughing hysterically and having a bunch of 14 year olds laughing their butts off is a lot more fun.