Entries this day: Work

Work

5:14pm JST Monday 1 September 2003

After LOTS of sleep, flipping and flopping about in bed, talking to janette (!) this morning, sleeping some more, I got myself to work on time. Steve happened to be on the same train, but I chose to zip up the stairs instead of talk to him on the way to work.

Had four lessons today so far and they've gone pretty well. Four more lessons until my weekend. Said HI to Miki who is now in Level 5 (today was her first L5 lesson and she said she was nervous; I was like, "chill; it's no biggie;" I wonder if it helped), news that she told me after she said, "my life is like hell," when I asked if today was her first day of school: "yes." "how is it?" "I hate it; my life is like hell." "Wow." "Today is my first level five lesson."

Had a student who is barely 7B. Had her man to man and she was really low; had lots of trouble with is/are and has/have. The lesson was "which ones are yours?" and in the book it's depicts a couple leaving a party and picking up their coats. I was like fuck that and laid out a bunch of animal flash cards. "Which ones are birds," and by the end she could say "these are birds" and barely "this one is a bird" (lot of work on the pronunciation of "this") and rarely correctly, "these animals have tails" or "this animal is brown" or "this animal is a cow"... she got all the little words mixed up, which is understandable; they're all fuckin' useless words in many ways, but hey. That's English.

That's language. words words words.

My three Level 4 women got a lesson on earthquakes and hurricanes and tornadoes and lightning, with a side platter of electrons, protons, nucleus, atom. I skipped neutron because we were just focusing on charge, without regard to specific atoms nor mass.

9:18pm

On the train now to roll outta Kawasaki for my weekend. Just finished off the night with voice, starring Kenji, Miki, someone, and Yukiyoshi (I think). Miki again said she hates high school and I got a sense of how much the Japanese workers are being screwed by their companies - working until 2am and feeling lucky to have a job. Okay fine, lucky to have a job, but not a sucky job that pays nothing extra for ridiculous amounts of overtime.

I basically told Miki she should try to get the hell outta Japan and go to the US and try to get a job; I'll give her Philip's contact info next time I see her. Maybe I'll remember to look up the info for the Japanese-American Society of Houston.