s of dollars. (The meal pictured here is a rather delicious pork cutlet "set.")Why did I skip out on lunch twice? Well, Monday's main course was supposed to be some kind of bean dish. No thanks! And Wednesday's meal was the ol' "Hungry Menu." Double no thanks!
I guess you could say I'm slowly running out of patience with the dorm food!
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Today's baseball game was postponed due to rain. For whatever reason, we're not making the game up until next Wednesday, as in nine days from today. The weather for the rest of the week is supposed to be nice and sunny, so why can't we play tomorrow, instead, for instance? It's not like there are a bunch of games taking place all week. So now we have (our final) two games scheduled for next week: Monday and Wednesday.
I love how the league office spreads our five games out over about seven or eight weeks. How am I supposed to get any kind of rhythm going by playing so few games spaced so far apart? By the way, we lost our second game but won our third, so we're now 1-2. Oh, and in case you're wondering, yes, I did redeem myself in game two. With a vengeance.
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The other day, I talked to my supervisor about testing the first-graders (as a reminder once again, I'm talking about seventh-graders in the U.S.) in oral proficiency just about once a week. My idea is that the kids should have to see me some time during the week and recite x amount of sentences, with the x increasing by 1 every week. That way, by the time the kids move on to the second grade, they'll be fairly fluent in basic conversational English, unlike most of the students at my school (and all over Japan I dare say).
For the first test, I suggested that the kids tell me their name, where they were from, and how old they were. My supervisor wasn't so keen on the idea initially but later agreed to let me carry out my plan.
So last Wednesday I explained the concept to the students in class, in English. At one point, my supervisor wanted to start telling the students my idea in Japanese, so that they would all understand me, but I did my best to keep him quiet.
I explained the test over and over, in as many ways as possible until I finally got through to some of the kids. To make sure I got through to all of the students, I asked for a volunteer to come up and introduce himself to me according to the "rules." He mastered his test like a champ, rattling off the three sentences in error-free English. I gave him a high-five and was sure I got my message across.
Wrong.
Friday morning, my supervisor told me that several first-graders' parents had called their kids' homeroom teacher and told him that their children were confused by my explanation and didn't know what their assignment was.
It figures. All I was asking the kids to do was introduce themselves to me, something they had already done on the first day of class! Am I really such a bad person for trying to teach the kids some English in English, for crying out loud(!)? Why is it that whenever you try to challenge kids, you end up getting an earful from a bunch of their parents? And I thought that only happened in America.
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A few weeks ago, most of the rice fields around here turned into rice paddies. All that water is now home to hundreds or perhaps even thousands of frogs (and other creatures such as snakes). So for the past few weeks, there's been a regular frog-croaking symphony going on at night.
Tonight, it sounds as though a woodpecker has joined in, since there's a loud "tap tap tap tap tap" coming from somewhere out there at regular intervals as well. Somehow, I've been able to sleep through the "music" just fine so far. I hope my luck continues. By the way, the rice paddies are about 50 feet from my balcony. I have to figure out a way to record the sound.
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