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Pencil for thank you bye bye!
This week was "Challenge Kids" for GEOS, so we had these exams that we were giving our kids' classes. I had to give the exam to the 8-year-olds today. It started with a listening quiz which lasted approximately 90 years (ok, 20 mins). Anyway, most of the listening sections would have one practice question and 5 real questions. So the first section was just "what letter am I saying?" So the Boy (there is only one Boy in this class, much to the chagrin of the 3 girls) said in Japanese "the practice answer will be D!!!" and then sure enough the tape goes "D! D! D!" and everyone except me is like "WHOAAAAAA!" and laughs.
They do the first part. The second part is also "circle the right letter" only it's lowercase. So, the practice question comes up and Boy yells "It's gonna be J!" A second later the tape goes "J! J! J!" and everyone else laughs again. Me, I just tell him to be quiet and take the test.
Fine, the next part happens and he guesses the practice letter for that one too. The next section was on numbers and he says "IT'S GONNA BE FOUR!!" in Japanese and, get this, the sample number was four. By this point I'm laughing too. I have no idea how he predicted them all but it was honestly pretty funny. Since he didn't call out answers during the actual questions I didn't think it was worth doing anything about it, plus there weren't any other practice questions.
They finished the test pretty early so I let them just run around my room and play dodgeball and stuff. Duane's kids also finished early; one of his students is Boy's older brother, who kept coming over and shaking my classroom door and running off, so they'd open the door and not see anyone there and all the kids were yelling "TOUMEI NINGEN! TOUMEI NINGEN! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!"
It turns out Boy's last class might be next week. Despite that he's sort of a pain in the neck (his latest thing is to steal my desk's wheely-chair and roll around my room before class and then refuse to get up out of it, so even today during the test he was sitting in the wheely-chair) I think I will actually miss him once he leaves. I had to lend him a pencil for the test today and when he left he gave it back to me like "Sensei, pencil for thank you bye bye!" Times like that I really don't know whether to laugh or cry. Seriously. If I ever write a book about my experiences as an English teacher it'll have to either be called "I am a hundred and thirty centimeters old" or "Pencil for thank you bye bye", I think.
My 7pm class had the student who played in the mandolin concert on Monday. She did get our note and was so happy we all came to see her play! I used mandolins as an example for today's lesson. "Guitars are somewhat bigger than mandolins... but a bass is MUCH bigger than a mandolin!"
I had a third student in the class, too, making up from Duane's lesson. She's the one who recognized my Hichori costume on Halloween, though she is from Nagoya and is a Dragons fan. Apparently she is moving to Kagoshima next year. I said "Oh! That's where Fukudome is from!" and she said "Kosuke is going to leave us and go to America! NOOOOOOOOOOO!" The funny part here is that we have a student at GEOS named Kosuke, and I think Eri got confused and thought we were talking about him, and was like "WHAT?!"
Oh, also, so at lunchtime, one of Duane's Sprint 8 students had shown up an hour early by accident. She's actually high enough level that she's going to become a GEOS teacher herself in a few weeks. Anyway, I was heading off to lunch so I asked if she'd want to come with me, and since that was probably more interesting than studying in the lobby for an hour, she said sure. We went to Little Spoon and got curry and spent lunchtime with her asking me questions about GEOS and I tried to answer them in a way that would help her think about stuff but not, like, give away all of our teaching secrets (since I mean, she is still a paying customer of GEOS). She ended up buying me lunch and I felt really really bad about it, although I guess if you think about it, usually an hour of speaking English with a GEOS teacher costs a lot more than katsu curry, so maybe she got a good deal, but on the other hand, I was happy to not eat lunch alone for once, so... guilt! Argh!
I vaguely wonder if I should friends-lock this entry. Hm.
You know, I swear that the frequency of my finding an open Pop'n'Music machine is directly related to the weather. The colder it gets outside, the harder it is to find an open PNM machine. But, I did get to play one game tonight in Kawaguchi. Oddly, despite the big crowd around the PNMs, the Bemani machines on the other side of the arcade were completely empty, so I played some IIDX and Drummania for a change. They've got some kickass songs in the latest DM/GF mix, like Orange Range's "Champion" and Sukima Switch's "Guarana" and Shibasaki Kou's "Invitation". Much fun. I played Spitz's "Cherry" as my last song just to be silly and I got up and the guy on the Guitar Freaks machine next to me was playing Spitz's "Robinson". Awesome.
They do the first part. The second part is also "circle the right letter" only it's lowercase. So, the practice question comes up and Boy yells "It's gonna be J!" A second later the tape goes "J! J! J!" and everyone else laughs again. Me, I just tell him to be quiet and take the test.
Fine, the next part happens and he guesses the practice letter for that one too. The next section was on numbers and he says "IT'S GONNA BE FOUR!!" in Japanese and, get this, the sample number was four. By this point I'm laughing too. I have no idea how he predicted them all but it was honestly pretty funny. Since he didn't call out answers during the actual questions I didn't think it was worth doing anything about it, plus there weren't any other practice questions.
They finished the test pretty early so I let them just run around my room and play dodgeball and stuff. Duane's kids also finished early; one of his students is Boy's older brother, who kept coming over and shaking my classroom door and running off, so they'd open the door and not see anyone there and all the kids were yelling "TOUMEI NINGEN! TOUMEI NINGEN! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!"
It turns out Boy's last class might be next week. Despite that he's sort of a pain in the neck (his latest thing is to steal my desk's wheely-chair and roll around my room before class and then refuse to get up out of it, so even today during the test he was sitting in the wheely-chair) I think I will actually miss him once he leaves. I had to lend him a pencil for the test today and when he left he gave it back to me like "Sensei, pencil for thank you bye bye!" Times like that I really don't know whether to laugh or cry. Seriously. If I ever write a book about my experiences as an English teacher it'll have to either be called "I am a hundred and thirty centimeters old" or "Pencil for thank you bye bye", I think.
My 7pm class had the student who played in the mandolin concert on Monday. She did get our note and was so happy we all came to see her play! I used mandolins as an example for today's lesson. "Guitars are somewhat bigger than mandolins... but a bass is MUCH bigger than a mandolin!"
I had a third student in the class, too, making up from Duane's lesson. She's the one who recognized my Hichori costume on Halloween, though she is from Nagoya and is a Dragons fan. Apparently she is moving to Kagoshima next year. I said "Oh! That's where Fukudome is from!" and she said "Kosuke is going to leave us and go to America! NOOOOOOOOOOO!" The funny part here is that we have a student at GEOS named Kosuke, and I think Eri got confused and thought we were talking about him, and was like "WHAT?!"
Oh, also, so at lunchtime, one of Duane's Sprint 8 students had shown up an hour early by accident. She's actually high enough level that she's going to become a GEOS teacher herself in a few weeks. Anyway, I was heading off to lunch so I asked if she'd want to come with me, and since that was probably more interesting than studying in the lobby for an hour, she said sure. We went to Little Spoon and got curry and spent lunchtime with her asking me questions about GEOS and I tried to answer them in a way that would help her think about stuff but not, like, give away all of our teaching secrets (since I mean, she is still a paying customer of GEOS). She ended up buying me lunch and I felt really really bad about it, although I guess if you think about it, usually an hour of speaking English with a GEOS teacher costs a lot more than katsu curry, so maybe she got a good deal, but on the other hand, I was happy to not eat lunch alone for once, so... guilt! Argh!
I vaguely wonder if I should friends-lock this entry. Hm.
You know, I swear that the frequency of my finding an open Pop'n'Music machine is directly related to the weather. The colder it gets outside, the harder it is to find an open PNM machine. But, I did get to play one game tonight in Kawaguchi. Oddly, despite the big crowd around the PNMs, the Bemani machines on the other side of the arcade were completely empty, so I played some IIDX and Drummania for a change. They've got some kickass songs in the latest DM/GF mix, like Orange Range's "Champion" and Sukima Switch's "Guarana" and Shibasaki Kou's "Invitation". Much fun. I played Spitz's "Cherry" as my last song just to be silly and I got up and the guy on the Guitar Freaks machine next to me was playing Spitz's "Robinson". Awesome.
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But that doesn't explain why the other Bemani went underplayed... PNM consumes the most food energy thus creates the most heat?
Broken English too cute
Definitely pursue that bookwriting thing.. although everybody's been blogging.. you'd need a market for a PA chick who was on the West Coast for a while and now is hanging out in Japan teaching English.. :) And oh the wacky misadventures you can preface with "No, I am not making this up! I swear!"