Business Time

Let me document my day;

A smooth wake up at 6:30am and a shower and breakfast of tomato on toast gets me out the door right on time and into the car. The drive to Bato JHS takes about 35-40 minutes on the speed limit but I arrive much sooner than that and say the usual 'Good Morning' to a few students and 'Ohayo Gozaimasu' to the teachers and thus, at 8:00am begins my day.

I've got a pretty packed schedule and my first half of the day are third year classes. 3-1 were pleased to have English as lately they've been trialing out bizarre English phrases that are pretty funny. Today they were talking about a 'society window' which they gleaned from knowing words 'social studies' and 'window' ... can you guess what it means? I'll tell you at the end.
I teach three 3rd year classes before lunch begins and it get's a little tiring but I have about an hour free so I go and sit at my desk for a while.

For some reason about 5 kittens were found around the school which it would seem have been left as the owner couldn't take care of them and figured some students could. In any case some students are playing with them. This one student seems to think he's going to take one home which is a shame as this kid is obnoxious and would probably kill and eat it sooner than love it. I'm pretty sure kittens don't 'meow' like that around people they feel safe with ...

This week I am eating lunch with class 1-3 which have been a lot of fun to eat with lately. Their only first years so they have really only just learned the alphabet and are now onto saying things like 'This is a pen' and 'I like dog' but they've picked up some English from movies and games so it's always fun to see what they come up with next.

Lunch today is some kind of yellow soup, a bread roll (that comes with a jam/margerine spread), some fried hot chips and sausages (cold), milk, chocolate syrup to put IN the milk and a half of a frozen apple. It was a really unusual lunch mostly due to the chips/sausage component and the presence of the frozen apple - It was good though!

After lunch was 2-3 and as I like that class too it also went down pretty well. Howeverrrrrrr, then I had class 1-1 which have lately been a pain! It's all due to one student - Kawanishi-san. What a bastard. He's the type of kid that is remarkably clever at being disruptive and getting away with things but is stupid when it comes to doing anything else. His brother is in the third year and he's cool as (he's tiny!) so it's generally a bit of a chore to teach this class. I think to stop the English teacher from getting the students to say 'I like your Mother' but it's really uncomfortably hot and humid at this point so I don't really bother. I smile to myself.

Cleaning goes down without a hitch. I clean with 1-3 but this time they have out dictionaries so they've got some more English words to say. We say our 'Gokurosama deshita's' and that's it for teaching for the day!

The students have what's called a 'Suri-suta' day today which is a combination of the the English words for 'three' and study' (three = suri [soo ree]/ study = sutadi [soo tah dee]) which is a little bit of a loose link for what it is but it just involves the students studying for tests. I waste some time, drink some tea, make some conversation with the teachers until it's about 5pm and time for me to leave.

That concludes my day. I wanted this to be short and snappy.