It hasn't been a bad week so far. On Tuesday, Aso-sensei saved me from impending boredoom (spelling intended, Mum :D) with an invitation to two ichi-nensai classes, one on Wednesday and one on Thursday. These lessons were to cover the same chapter that I'd prepared a lesson for last week, for Okamoto-sensei's class. I didn't have quite as much freedom this time, however, as my lesson had to be based on exercises from the book. Which was good and bad, I suppose :)

The exercises, while necessarily somewhat boring (it's a textbook, after all), weren't too bad. I also tried my very best to make the class as fun as possible. I managed to fit my Upside Down Map (always a laugh when Australia appears on top, lol - completely freaks the kids out) and a brainstorm into the plan, which seemed to work well. Aso-sensei was very taken with the brainstorm and asked me to bring it into other classes too. Noice.

To my delight, too, I actually got somewhat decent responses from my classes! I always go into classes with a lot of energy, hoping it'll rub off on the kids and get them genki and volunteering for activities/to answer questions. The kids are just so 'well disciplined' (read: chronically quiet and shy in the presence of teachers) though, that in the past I've found that it doesn't really work in that way. The energy sure helps a lot in general in terms of attention span and work attitude, but it doesn't tend to make them volunteer. Until these classes, yatta! I had about three volunteers in my Wednesday class, and about seven today. It was like gaijin teaching heaven! So I came out of my lesson today on a real high :)

Just after the first of these classes yesterday, Ishino-sensei came past my desk with a corker of a question. In the sentence "We have been in the red ever since opening two new stores last spring", she wanted to know exactly why you could also say "We have been in the red ever since we opened two new stores last spring". As I've said before, having learnt English all my life, grammar is something I've long since forgotten. So needless to say, it was a good challenge involving all my grammar books and some time searching the web. Got it all worked out though, so all good. It's really interesting learning exactly how your own language works ... and how much you've forgotten about it!

After that, I dropped in at Minato-ya to catch up with Minato-san and order some bike parts, then headed to badminton. It was bloody freezing outside, which is probably part of the reason just three other players (Keiko-chan, Funamoto-san and Kimura-san) turned up. At least that meant we all had continuous game time, though! During the practice time, Kimura-san gave me a quick lesson in how to volley better. For some reason I got the technique down straight away and proceeded to make his life at the net difficult, for which cursed himself, lol. Other than that, though, I didn't play particularly well for the first few games. However, I kept a good attitude the whole time, so it was all good. Not letting myself get bogged down by my mistakes helped, as I picked up on two things that are clearly not good in my game - serve return and baseline smashes. Gotta do some practice on those!

After badminton, somewhat against my better judgement (given it was already 10:30pm) I jumped on the net and got chatting to my friend Darrell. He's badminton-crazy and a passing comment over Gtalk ended up in a full blown drawing and talking session on Skype to discuss badminton strategy. He gave me some tips on my problem areas from above, and some other random things he thought of as we chatted. By the time I'd finished talking to him and Elissa, it was nearly 1am! Yikes. Feeling a wee bit sleepy today...

Today I had my class in the morning and when I arrived back in the staff room, learnt that today was the last official school day for san-nensai. I was a little sad about that as I'd gotten used to having them around and I find that they're naturally the most mature students to deal with. I'd sometimes go hang around with them at lunchtime and talk about random stuff, much to their delight. I also found out that their last class was in fourth period, so at lunchtime I went and hung around in the little corridor they all pass through to get to their bikes. I saw most of my OC class students off, and wished them good luck with their exams. It's not quite the final goodbye, as I will see them all again at graduation next month.

Tonight is the Rotary New Year party, which I accidentally forgot about when thinking about transport to school today. Looks like I'll be leaving my bike here and riding the chari to school tomorrow, haha. Good times. The party should be good. Although it's mostly older people who can't speak any English, they sure know how to drink and they're very friendly. Hopefully I'll be able to see the other ALTs, Phillip and Claire, too. Seeing them just once every 6 months? Could be worse, I suppose!

Tomorrow is Friday, woohoo! :) No classes that I know of, so I can get stuck into learning some Japanese. Got the third JET Japanese test to do as well as some study on the net. I found an awesome website for Japanese verb conjugations (here) so I'm steadily going through them and creating a spreadsheet to document it all in summary. I'm fascinated by Japanese verbs. I read a (slightly exaggerated) comment somewhere that verbs are 80% of the language, due to the ability in Japanese to leave the subject out and still have clear sentences. So they're pretty important. Oh yes.

And of course, the weekend looms near as well. Not entirely sure what I'm going to be doing. I want to go to Osaka to pick up some warm gear at Mont Bell, and hopefully can combine that with a dinner somewhere on the way back. All the way to Osaka just to do shopping might appeal tremendously to a girl, but not to me... :D I also want to catch up with Kazu, who I haven't seen for ages, and Takashi too, so I'll see what I can do. Sunday there's the oyster festival which I'm not too sure about, badminton, and maybe a trip to Kobe. Good times. Then of course, just four days before Hokkaido, yatta! All is good.