Expect the unexpected

The title of this post is pretty much the three words to remember in this line of work. You never really know what you're getting yourself into on any given day, before any given class. Hell, even if you've taught a certain group of kids before in the previous month, you never really know what kind of mood they're going to have coming into class. That being said, teaching here in Japan has been a job incomparable to any that I've had in the past. I've always had jobs where I've pretty much known what to expect in terms of the upcoming work day, and that's only partially true here. You start telling yourself, "well, I know I have these classes today and it's going to have this age group of kids, so things should go like this". Sounds all fine and dandy doesn't it? The truth is, you should just throw those preconceptions out the window because it's really about as random as it gets.

Today, for example, was a pretty tiring day. I worked a whopping three hours total but two of those hours (two classes) were some of the smaller kids, where you're running around, singing songs and acting like you're 5 years old again. Two of those classes, back-to-back, made for a exhausting start to the day. Our classes are broken down in to color-coding, with colors denoting the age group and curriculum level for the students attending. My second class of the day, Green, consisting of mostly 4 and 5 year old's, was rough because one of the girls, after being left by her mother, started crying uncontrollably, constantly calling out for her mother. Another girl showed up with her mom and she too was balling her eyes out. Luckily this mom didn't bolt out the door right away and decided to hang out for the entire class just to make sure her daughter would calm down. I was actually grateful for this because she helped to calm the other crybaby down as well. So you see, the crying was unexpected. Also, there are times when the kids want to listen to everything you say and then suddenly, without warning, those same kids will start ignoring you to the point of driving you mad. I know that some of you reading this that have had experience wrangling children are probably laughing to yourselves and saying, "oh this poor sap...that's just children!", well I'm telling you to shut up because this is my story! Oh, and the language barrier with the kids makes it twice as difficult to corral them, but hey, I got myself into this.

Lucky for me, and this truly felt like a breath of fresh air, my last class of the day was what we call a Junior Pathways class. These kids are around 13 to 14 years old and the students for this class, at this particular school, are awesome. They have great personalities, seem eager to learn, have fun, and are generally just a pleasure to teach. I was, however, dreading this class a bit only because the lesson for this unit/term is a bit difficult to teach. It's on homophones; ya know, those groups of words that share the same pronunciation but have different meanings and can be spelled differently (bear/bare, sea/see, right/write, etc.). You get what I'm saying. My fears were tossed aside though because these kids are really just super bright and understood what I was teaching them, even though they admitted it was difficult. Just grasping the content is half the battle! Long story short, my exhausting, stressful start to the teaching day ended with a wonderful, relaxing class of smart, attentive kids.

My next teaching week starts on Tuesday and even though I've taught at this upcoming school before, I really don't know what to expect. Sigh.

Big energy drink...big disappointment.

Yakitori...chicken on a stick. As awesome as it sounds.

The lonely train home.

Salsa flavored Pringles...they were awesome!

Sometimes I don't know what I'm eating.

Honey and lemon cider. I love this drink.