I figured when I left school on Friday afternoon that Monday was going to be busy, and it sure was! It was made a little bit heavier too by the fact that I still hadn't quite recovered from the beach party, hehe. I think I would have been fine except for the friendly local who bought me a bottle of beer at Minato-ya on Sunday night (yay random acts of Japanese kindness) and the fact I managed to get burnt on Sunday morning ;/ Still, I ganbarimashita-ed and fought my way through the whole day ok :)

I jumped straight into it on Monday morning, as two ni-nensei classes (in periods 2 and 3) had been sprung on me at the last minute and I needed to prepare a lesson. Thankfully, the textbook chapter, which appeared daunting at first, was surprisingly easy to cook up activities for. I knocked up a crossword from the vocab, pulled out my Kocho-sensei's Monkey worksheet (a word game where the students have to think of words from A-Z on a given topic) and mixed it all up with a little reading and pronunciation practise, and the lesson was ready to go! It went down pretty well with the kids too, who were genki after having finished exams the previous week.

That took me up to lunch time, when I started marking the rest of my tests. I'd just finished one class when my ESS club students rocked up and wanted my help with their cultural festival project. The timing wasn't great but I'm paid to be genki about everything, so I jumped out of my seat and run up to the LL room to set them up. They were relatively genki despite the heat, so once they were happily sitting on the floor scrawling away about how disgusting Vegemite is on their massive sheets of poster paper, I excused myself and got back to my marking. I finally finished it just after 6pm, after checking in on my ESS kids a few times.

It was at this point that I realised I still hadn't gotten around to planning a lesson for my ichi-nensei classes the next day. I had tried, but the teacher I normally plan with was busy when I was free and vice versa, and she'd left in the early afternoon. I felt utterly depressed. It was 6pm, I was dog tired from the stress of the morning and the boredom of marking, not to mention the carry over effects of the beach party, and I just wanted to go home and sleep. Kinda like how I used to feel at work in Australia just before I left, haha. Still, I forced myself to keep on going.

I wasn't entirely sure what to do so in the end pulled a gaijin and just made a lesson plan myself. It was really easy as I just used the music class I'd done with my san-nensei the year before. It's a great, easy, relaxing class to use at the end of term that still has syllabus content (listening skills and world awareness). So I printed off some sheets, set up my ipod and called it a day just before 7pm.

Today was a much more chilled out day, which was very welcome. I had two classes, the first of which was pretty stressful as somebody had stuffed the speakers up in the LL room. Goodness knows how. I'd used it just a few weeks before and it was fine, so perhaps rather naively I assumed that it would be ok. I learnt my lesson though - never underestimate the power of human stupidity. Like changing the settings on a mixer so nothing works, which we later found out was the problem. *sigh*. Anyway, thankfully I had a backup plan which was just going through the answers to the recent test instead. And speaking about the test, I was really impressed with how well my kids went, even the weaker classes. I was really happy about that because I felt I'd made a pretty fair test, and they still performed well. They must have studied after all. I hope that was at least partly because of my influence - makes me feel that I'm valuable here :)

I had another class with Kurioka-sensei later today as well, which the speakers were fixed for, so I got to do my music class after all. Yippee! It's always a lot of fun, and the kids love listening to music. I think they are really interested in what I like to listen to, and all the different types of music I have. They pretty much only seem to listen to American and Japanese music, so Irish, Russian, German, Australian, Taiwanese and so on music really freaks them out, haha. I only wish they looked as interested in what's going on during all my classes :P