Weekly Logs Nov.25-Dec.1, 2019

Monday;

I taught in the small class. And then I went to the teachers’ room to make photocopies of reading material. It took a several hours that were more than I expected. So I could not eat the lunch of the teacher restaurant. I ate my lunch in the student restaurant. I went back my residence and tried working, but I couldn’t. I was too tired to work. It was 5 p.m. when I got up my bed. I started making PPT for Wed/Thu listening classes. I cooked my supper at 8, had supper at 9, and went to bed at 10.

Tuesday;

In the morning I prepared for the small class of Wednesday until 9 a.m. Since then I continued to make PPT for listening classes. This week PTT making for listening class took 8 hours in total. Since it was 12 hours last week, I could shorten the hours to make it. I took a nap at 3 p.m. for an hour. Got up at 4 and then started PPT making for the composition classes. I wanted to make less PPT slides than usual by using photocopies of reading material in the class. But it couldn’t be short.

Wednesday;

I taught two classes in the morning. One was the listening class and the other was small class. Both were for 1^st grade. I realized that a native Japanese teacher was not necessary for that listening class. I mean, in the class, I just play the audio and say “The answer is A.”, and play the audio again and say “The answer is B”, and so on. I felt like I was just a kind of machine to play listening materials. After the lunch I spent the whole of afternoon to make PPT for Thu/Fri composition classes.

Thursday;

I tried finishing PPT making for composition class by noon. This week it was 14 hours to make PPT for 90 minutes class for composition. I hate or worry about a shortage of PPT slides. If PPT doesn’t last by the end of the class, it would be sheer evidence that I was ill-prepared. So I want to have enough slides of PPT. Anyway, I spent so many hours for PPT that I could not finish the evaluation of students’ composition by class hours.

Friday;

Fortunately I had already finished the evaluation of compositions of Friday class. So I tried evaluating the rest of Thursday class, but I was so tired that I could not do any job in the morning. Composition class was in the early evening. I realized in the class that one of the best students looked so tired and sleepy. I was anxious if the student was okay or not. Got back in my residence I continued the evaluation of compositions of last week. I went to bed at 10 p.m. Since I was so tired, I thought I could fall asleep soon. But I could not sleep until 1 a.m.

Saturday;

I woke up at 6 a.m. as usual. Since it was weekend, I wanted to sleep more, but I could not sleep again. Although I got up, I didn’t feel good. What I could do in the morning was just making two evaluation sheets for compositions that I got from two classes this week. I took a lunch in the university restaurant and then went outside of university to go to a grocery store. I bought a lot of vegetable for a week. I took a nap afternoon and started composition evaluation. One of compositions was so broken in grammar that it took more than one hour for me to write explanation and correction with red ink. I worked for four hours, cooked my supper, thought about work schedule while I was waiting for cooling down of the supper (I don’t like too-hot meal), ate them at 9, and went to bed at 10.

Sunday;

I have to teach the small class three times in “Odds number week”. The coming week is the fifteenth week. I thought I had to prepare well for that class. I made three teaching plans for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday classes. I finished the preparation by 11a.m. And then I started to make a handout for the composition class. Actually the students do not take notes of my lecture. I told them to do so but they don’t seem to do at all. They just see my lecture like TV show. When they write their compositions as a homework assignment, they have already forgotten what they heard from me in the class. I think that one solution would be to give them a handout having a lot of blanks to be filled with. I will make the students fill the blanks during the class so that it will be a kind note-taking. I am not sure if it will work or not, but I want to give it a try. I finished drafting of the handout at 3, wrote this log one hour, and evaluated students’ composition from 4 to 7 p.m. That was the end of my weekend.