Blog Update - How's it going Hana?

Well, I seem to be resorting to asking myself inane questions in order to get the word count up a bit on this blog (which I need to get to 50,000 words by the end of November to achieve my self-set blog-novel-writing-month challenge).

Today, I was VERY tired. I think five-days of non-stop action did me in. Luckily, I only had one class to teach today (plus 90 minutes in the Language Lounge - one annoying student turned up so I decided to close it early!).

The class went really well actually. I had devised this nasty assignment meant to get the students doing some more speaking and writing and I thought they would react badly, but they didn't and I put it down to a few teacher-y techniques on my part.

1. I let them choose 4 topics out of a possible 15 or so. I just spread out all the different sheets across some desks and they came and took what they wanted.

2. We listened to Avril Lavigne in the background while they got started writing.

3. I gave them some very specific feedback on their speaking tests and told them why saying "oh-oh-oh" didn't sound very English and why they should strive to use subject-verb sentences when speaking. I thought this would be annoying for them - it is very basic grammar that they learnt in their first few years of junior highschool - but I managed to come up with some common errors that they make to help send it home to them that they need to bloody well concentrate when they are speaking : )

e.g.1 In answer to "Did you do your homework?", they invariably answer "Forget" (literal translation from "wasureta" in Japanese).

e.g.2 In answer to "Why were you absent last week?", they usually say "Cold" (literal translation from "kaze" in Japanese), they laughed when they realized it has a couple of meanings.

e.g.3 "What will you do this weekend?" "Go out" ("dekakeru"). I explained that without a subject, this would sound like a command "Go out!". I used a bit of my teacher-ly license here, because actually it is quite a natural way to answer the question, but I wanted to drive home the fact that students need to learn and use the "rules" correctly before they start "breaking" them.

Most of the above explanation was for the benefit of one student who seems to be the lowest in the class. I have no idea how he got to be into the level 5 (out of 6 levels) class. I also don't know why another student, Masanori, whose speaking and comprehension are excellent, is not in the highest class. I am going to ask Price, our academic co-ordinator person, how they were tested.

So, that was a good class.

Back to the blog, well, I have written over 4000 words and done a lot of cooking (well, um, three things?). The words are okay because I can add more whenever but I have to catch up on the cooking a bit - or write some posts on the cups of tea, morning porridge for Rai, or even the seaweed glug smeared on rice that I had for lunch today, in order to reach my goal of "cooking" something every day.

Dammit - why don't I just do that and stop feeling guilty?