The Lighthearted Wanderer

Ikakita's 3rd year Elective OC Class  Monday, June 25 What to do??????? So I'm still not sure if I'll be able to get those last classes with my first year students, but I did end up telling the first year department chief that, "it would break my heart if I didn't have a real final lesson" with my first year classes. He laughed but seemed to understand why I said that, so all I can do is wait for the schedule. Things are rolling pretty fast, it's exactly 4 weeks until the end of my contract, but I'll stop teaching classes before that. Some of my last classes are tomorrow and Friday actually, so I probably should get to planning and figuring out what to do. --Edit-- Saturday, June 30 So I ended up doing a bunch of cool things actually. First I had the kids do a fill-in-the-blank dash of questions and answers about me, hehehe. Then we did a mad libs activity in pairs (mad libs can either go pretty well or flop depending on the class atmosph...

It's so easy to get burned out. But if it really is that easy, does that mean that I wasn't resilient enough in the first place? It's the final countdown here Japan-side, and my work as an ALT will soon be over. Day-to-day, I have lapses of "gosh, I'm just starting to get the hang of this" and "man, wouldn't it be great if the kids had one ALT for the whole school year for once"...stuff like that. A part of me still wishes that I could have made a read difference. And sometimes I fall into the trap of thinking that I actually did. I'm gloomy today, I think that's pretty easy to tell. I just had one of those classes where it was like there was an invisible wall between me and the students, filtering out only what I was saying. Nothing seemed fun, everything seemed like I was torturing them. And I realized that it was probably a good thing that they were getting someone new next term, at least the excitement of getting a new person can ...

Of course it was an incident at work today involving cultural diversity that is getting me fired up enough to write a post about this. Just as I am forgetting about the little things here in Japan that make me tilt my head and go, "Huh?", something else comes up and it's like I can feel the invisible atmosphere of suppressiveness closing in. It doesn't make much sense, no one really cares here what I think about these sort of things. Okay that's over-exaggeration, I think it might be a generational sort of thing. I'll explain more in a moment. This particular eye-opening spit-choking moment had to do with a translation contest. One of the English teachers at my school told me that over the summer, our school's English Speaking Society (ESS) will be translating a picture book, Olanna's Big Day , into Japanese. She asked me to take a look and return it to her after.   So the book is about a young student (probably elementary, since the book sa...

So some of my advanced students said that they wanted to learn more about American culture/life in America. And it's just been long enough that I am bit at a loss... Where should I start? O_O ideas welcome and necessary

This weekend I kicked off June in style with my boy here in Kobe. In style consisted of exploring scary mountains at night, climbing structures, wandering crowded Osaka streets and spacious castles grounds, pretending to belong in fancy buildings, watching great movies and tv, and just all-around chilling. So needed and really really wonderful :)