And another little Grrr

This time from Keio Academy. It's enough to have to juggle two kindy runs and my cooking lesson today, without getting a phone call from Keio Academy in the morning asking me what to do in the Higashi College Orientation today. The What? Nobody told ME that college's semester began today! He's like, 'So what will we do after the introduction?' And I'm like, 'Hang on, you say we have the lesson today?'. Of course I don't know what to do, I wasn't there last year. 'We'll start Unit O in the text book' I say. 'We don't have any text books yet' he replies. OH. So, I have to arrange for Lena to be picked up from kindy, reorganize my English lesson/cooking lesson swap this afternoon, and I know we are doing chirashi-zushi which can't really be put off, if Waka-chan has already prepared the ingredients...AND I have three hours to figure out how to amuse twenty 18-year olds for an hour. I will let you know later on how it went.

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There were 23 18-year olds, and what a lovely bunch. The boys (only six of them) were a lot more outgoing than in my last class, where all three of them were 'sleepers'. We have already covered Harry Potter and Avril Lavigne, perpetual subjects of interest with teenage boys in Japan! That leaves 18 girls, and none seem nasty or lazy - yet.

I decided I would put them into groups, since I want to teach this class this semester in groups, not rows. And I would get them to write five English questions (using their memories of junior high school and high school English) and use them to survey the class. The other teachers had prepared a list of questions to ask, and planned to use the format of writing the answer only on the board, and seeing if they could elicit the appropriate question. I combined the two activities and we did five easy questions to start (Rachel, 8/28, Hawera New Zealand, chocolate, swimming). When they had all asked five other students the questions I wrote up five trickier ones (green, Scruffy, tennis, London, French).

I have just finished eating the chirashi-zushi, it is not as sweet as Baachan's, typically for Waka-chan, whose dished are often stronger in hot and sour flavors, as opposed to Baachan, who prefers sweet or salty. Next is Again again.