Weekly Logs: Aug.3-9, 2020

Photographs on the week (Another blog of mine)

August 03, Monday

I went to a branch office of the city hall in the morning to get some verifications of my stamp. Still we Japanese have to use a stamp for signing an important document. A stamp is an out-of-date habit to verify a person who agreed on a document. I think it should be taken place by signature. But anything in Japan is slow to change, lagging behind to be better. And then I went to city library to make my card to borrow the books in the library. I took a log nap in the afternoon, went to a convenience store in order to pay some equivalent to 160 USD for Japanese National Pension (in fact, it was for April), and went to a supermarket to buy food for supper.

August 04, Tuesday

I worked all day. I checked how and where the important grammatical items appeared in each section of reading book that is part of Minnano Nihongo series. That reading material is so well organized. For example, one grammatical item appears in repeatedly in several sections so that a learner can understand, learn, and use themselves the item. So it is important for a teacher to know how, where, and what a grammatical item appears in the reading material.

August 05, Wednesday

I worked all day doing the same thing the day before. I assumed that I would teach 16 sections in the reading book in the coming semester. So I analyzed 16 sections in two days.

August 06, Thursday

I lost the memory of the day. Nothing is recorded on my business diary. I think I started preparing for another subject that I was going to teach in the coming semester. That was the class to teach business manner that can specifically be applied to Japanese working place.     

August 07. Friday

I went to a ceremony for the families that lost loved ones in this year. That was in the morning hours. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, there was no lunch at the noon;  the ceremony was ended within an hour. When I went to the venue in the morning, I got on a taxi from the railway station. That taxi costed 2,790JPY. So I wanted to save money, walked back to the station. Actually it took two hours! I felt tired but I was okay, because I had been just sitting on tatami for this half year. I just wanted to walk by my legs.

August 08. Saturday

It was just yesterday, but I have almost lost my memory about yesterday. It was rainy. So it was like the rainy season had come back again. I went to the nearby library to pick up a book that I asked the library to get from other library through the web site of Niigata city library. Other than that, I had just kept working all day for the business manner class for the coming semester.

August 09, Sunday

It was almost like yesterday. I got an email from the library saying that other five books had delivered to my nearby library. So I went there as yesterday to pick them up in the morning. Other than that, I had just worked all day for making PPT slides for business class.

Although it is now summer break, I assigned homework to the 1734 class students. That was to explain their name in Japanese Kanji so that a Japanese person could tell the Kanji(s) for his/her name. Today is the deadline for the assignment, but still 10 students have not sent their homework to me. Actually the class 1735 is even worse. Many of them have not yet registered to the group on Dingtalk. So I cannot give them the same homework assignment as 1734.

I am going to teach three subjects in the coming semester. All the three is new to me. One year ago, I was going to teach listening for 1^st grade students, composition for 2^nd grade, and intermediate Japanese for other departments’ students. The last one was contingent, actually. But anyway, if I will teach the listening or composition class, I mean, just one of them, I could have taken a little rest during this summer break. Now I have to prepare new three subjects, I cannot have even one holiday. I need to continue to work every day for preparation. No progress from the last year.

Currently my wordpress blog does not get viewers. Almost no one visits here. The reason is obvious; I just write one post a week only these days. So sometimes I feel I want to write a post. But now it is not the time for it. I should not waste my time for blogging; rather, I need to spend my time for preparation for the classes. And I feel, after all, I think it is difficult for me to write English. For these four years, I have just tried to learn how to teach Japanese. I am a native Japanese speaker, but being a native and teaching the language well are different. I devoted so much for Japanese for so long, now my English has almost disappeared from my brain.