Six-Six-Six

Week 6’s come and gone and to be honest it was a pretty easy week. Test season began on Friday and Thursday was only a four-period day. In essence this mean I had Thursday and Friday off. You saw some of the fruits of this free time with yesterday’s whinge about analogies and I’ve got more where that came from. I also spent a good deal of time reading Coin Locker Babies (the book I purchased for the book club), playing Virtua Tennis 3 and getting back into Neon Genesis Evangelion. Like I said, it was a pretty easy week.

I do want to point out that I would like to be doing more work. I ask my teachers if there’s anything I can help with and they tell me there isn’t. There was some work to do helping Maeda-sensei use Word 2003 but at the end of the day the fact is that I’m at only one school for the entire week. Although the school isn’t small when it buckles down into test season there’s not a whole lot for me to do work-wise. I do plan to spend most of next week preparing an oral examination for the first year students, finishing up my application for the College of Law, renewing my New South Wales driver’s licence, switching to a spousal visa, gathering information for the Sakai ALT Home Town fair that’s coming up and getting Lesson 22 ready. So it’s not as if I’ll just be twiddling my thumbs all the time.

The biggest thing that happened was at the monthly (ha!) ALT meeting we had on Thursday afternoon. Anne raised the suggestion she had broached with me last week of visiting each other’s schools and in what came as a complete surprise to me Kojima-sensei was totally cool with it. I’ve run it by my English teachers and they’re all happy with it. Kussu-sensei asked the deputy principal what he thought and he just wants Anne to prepare some material for the class (I’m not entirely sure why but Kussu said if it was just self-introduction stuff that’d be fine).

All in all it’s pretty exciting. I’m finally going to get a chance to go to a junior high school even if it is only for a day. We’re still not exactly sure when this will be. Anne only has tests at her school until Monday and since test season at Ichiko continues until Friday this means there’s the strong possibility I could come to visit sometime next week in which case I’ll have a lot to talk about next week. Otherwise it’ll be sometime in June. Other teachers expressed interest in doing similar visits and to be honest I don’t know why schools don’t do it more often. I’m sure it would be interesting for students to see foreign ALTs interacting and at schools like Ichiko where they’re never going to get a female ALT (there was a negative experience in the past) it’s a chance to meet a very different person.

I’m regressing back through the week trying to think if there was anything that interesting that went down but I’m coming up blank. Hopefully next week will prove to be a little more exciting!