投稿者: liangzhilaoshi

Today is the tenth day of the spring semester 2024. I don’t have a class on Wednesday, although I have to do a lot of work for teaching. I woke up 5a.m. today. These days I write a blog post before going to bed in previous night, and I upload the post right after I get up in the morning. Today too, I uploaded my yesterday’s draft in the early morning. I ate my breakfast which were leftover of the supper last night, washed my cloths by the washing machine, hung the wet clothes in my room to dry out them, and started working as usual.

Today, I had been making PPT slides for my conversation class. They were for teaching NA-adjectives. There are two types of adjectives in Japanese; one is I-adjectives and the other is NA-adjectives. It is quite difficult for Japanese learners to properly conjugate these two adjectives. My student, too, feel it very difficult. What they are doing is to avoid conjugation of I-adjectives as long as they can. But such an effort is just producing errors. When conjugation is unavoidable, they conjugate an I-adjectives as if it is a Na-adjectives.

At noon, I went outside. It seemed that spring had come already. The sun was shining and the sky was blue. Snow and ice on the pavement had almost gone. People’s winter clothes had become thinner and lighter than two weeks ago. I had my lunch in teacher’s cafeteria a little late because I didn’t like congestion by many teachers in lunch time. I got my one jacket and two trousers back from a laundry after lunch. Though I wanted to buy citrus fruits in a fruits shop, I just went into a supermarket and bought milk and Cola.

I don’t think I need to write about my afternoon today. It was just nap and PPT making.

Today is the eighth day of the spring semester. And also, today is Monday. I have three classes on Monday; Late morning, early afternoon, and late afternoon. Of the three, two are the listening course for second-year students and one the conversation course for first-year students.

   I wanted to keep sleeping until 6 a.m. but I woke up at 4 a.m. Sleeping hours were not enough to start a week. So, I took short sleeping minutes twice today; from 7:30 to 8:00 after my breakfast and from 12:30 to 13:00 after my lunch. These things indicate that it is easy for me to fall asleep after eating a meal.

   In the classroom for the second-year students, there are big tables. 6 to 7 students can have a seat around one table. Last time, five students committed cheating during a small quiz. They were students who seated around the same table. So, this time I made them have a seat on five different tables. I guess that they understood my warning.

   Another small happening today was about my accent. The first-year students learned Japanese words about time and date today. When I pronounced “Shigatsu (April in Japanese)” in front of my students, I just remembered what I listened from radio recently. That radio show talked about the accent of “Shigatsu”. They introduced an episode in which someone in a studio was required to correct his or her accent of Shigatsu by the director. The radio personality expressed his empathy with Kansai people saying that they wanted to say “Shigatsu” with their accent.

   Accent of Japanese is so-called “pitch accent” consisting low and high pitches. The standard accent of Shi-ga-tsu is Low-High-High. When I uttered “Shigatsu” as a model pronunciation in front of my students, I remembered the episode, and quickly I started worrying about my accent. I took my electronic dictionary out from my bag and checked the accent of “Shigatsu” by the accent dictionary of NHK. And I realized what I pronounced was different from the standard. I said it with High-Low-Low. I apologized to my students and uttered “Shigatsu” again with Low-High-High accent

I was born and raised in northern part of Japan. The region is not in western Japan. But through my life and career, I spent much time with Kansai people. Thanks to communication of many years with them, my Japanese pronunciation is heavily affected by Kansai accent. I try to pay attention to my accent, because I often speak Japanese words with Kansai accent.

Don’t get me wrong, I would never be denial to Kansai accent. Kansai people are a group in Japan with fabulous culture. I respect them. Historically they have been the center of Japan. It is NEITHER which is good or bad, NOR superior or inferior. Important thing is that I have to be careful about the difference between the standard and Kansai accents. The worst is being unconscious with such issue when I teach Japanese language to foreign people. I think I have to check my accent more often using the NHK accent dictionary.

This is the seventh day of the spring semester. The second week will start tomorrow. That means I have to prepare for classes in coming week. I have eight classes a week, but luckily enough, I just have to prepare for PPT presentations for four classes, because I teach the same subject to two class of the same grade. I had completed the first one in Friday night, the second at noon on Saturday, the third in the morning today, and I completed the fourth Power point presentation just before, Sunday night. One class lasts 90 minutes, or I could say it is 95 minutes with 45 minutes for first half, 5 minutes break, and 45 minutes for last half. My PPT usually becomes 45 slides for 90 minutes class. I use seven hours to make PPT for one class in average sense.

Today has been another peaceful weekend day. I got up at 5 a.m., upload a post on wordpress, took a breakfast of steamed rice, miso soup, and a cup of protein supplement shaken with cow milk. As for protein supplement, not with cow milk, but I wanted to mix it with goat milk, thinking about digestion. But I cannot find any goat milk these days on the shelves in a supermarket. Probably it’s because there is no grass on the ground in this time of season.

I turned on the power switch of the hot water tank. I wanted to take a shower in the morning. But I kept making PPT after the breakfast. I just missed the timing to take a shower. Maybe I am stinky. Once I completed PPT slides for listening course of the second-year students, I quickly started making PPT slides for conversation course of the first-year students.

At noon, I went outside for lunch. I went to the Campus restaurant and ate a bowl of “Beef Rah-men”. I got discount for teachers. But I couldn’t find any single piece of beef in the Rah-men. They may say beef is used for soup.

On the way back to the residence, I brought my jacket and two trousers to a laundry. And bought 12 litter water and two cartons of cow milk. Leaving my purchases in my room, I went outside again, this time to the administrative building. Since I don’t have a printer in my room, I wanted to use the printer in the teachers’ room. I was there for an hour, printing some documents about the final examinations in the last semester. Printing quality was bad. It must have been black and white printing, but made many parts gray. Probably the toner is not a genuine product.

I came back a little past three in the afternoon. I continued to work for PPT making. I cooked my supper with a lot of vegetable from 6 to 7 p.m. After the supper I completed the fourth PPT on this weekend at 8 p.m. And now I am writing this.

There will be a lot of scoring work in coming week. Those are retests of the final examinations of last semester. What I am worrying about now is that I will not be able to prepare well for the classes on next week of the coming week. Tough time continues. I don’t have time to rest.

   The first week of the semester is over. I got up at 5 a.m. I was making PPT slides for the conversation course in the morning hours. I finished making them and went outside my residence a little past noon. I went to the campus restaurant and ate ten boiled dumplings. It has been my habit to eat boiled dumplings on weekend since last semester. While waiting for the dumplings, I found there were two huge caldrons of free soup. I poured that soup into a bowl.

   10 dumplings are good amount for my stomach. Probably 15 are too much and would make my afternoon a nightmare. When I got 10 hot dumplings, I took oily hot pepper sauce and vinegar to a small dish. But I was disappointed by the fact that grated fresh garlic was gone on the counter. Then I ate dumplings and soup. I saw several red lines in the soup. They were antennae of shrimps. The soup was taste of shrimp.

   When I finished my lunch, I went outside campus for shopping. I wanted to buy foods for coming week. I always come to the same shop in the town. People there know my face. What I bought today were; green vegetable, green beans, two carrots, white mushroom, five pears, five citrus oranges, three blocks of pork, and 5kg of rice. On the ways of go-and-back, I saw many vendors were selling strawberries. I was just wondering why there were so many strawberries were being sold on roadside in this time, because the season was still very early spring. When I grew strawberries by myself in my garden several years ago, the season of strawberry was late spring. The strawberries I saw today must be grown up in greenhouses. I didn’t want to buy them because I had already bought pears and oranges.

   I took a nap for two hours in my room after coming back from shopping. Probably my fatigue had accumulated more than I thought. Anyway, once I got up from the bed, I started working again. I continued to make PPT slides for listening course by the time of cooking supper. I boiled green beans and ate them with mayonnaise. That was my Saturday.

Today was the fifth day of the spring semester in 2024, also the final day of the first week. I taught just one class today. It was the conversation course for the first-year students. Again, I couldn’t get the power source for my laptop computer. In order to save the energy, I made the computer display as dark as possible. The battery lasted until the end of the class. After the class, I came back to my room straightly. Although I wanted to take a rest, I continued to work. I scored small quizzes that I had assigned the second-year students. And then, I found a problem.

In the last semester, I realized that my students of listening course didn’t prepare before the class. They came to the class without listening to audio materials of the textbook. So, I decided adopting new way to make my students listen to audio mp3 before the class; first, I upload mp3 onto Dingtalk to share the listening material, second, students listened to it and take notes about what they listened, and third, at the beginning of the class, I made my students answer to small quiz. I make questions such that a student cannot answer if he/she hasn’t listened to audio materials.

The problem I found was that four students with high points actually didn’t download the mp3 file from Dingtalk. The four were sitting at the same desk with one student. That one student did download mp3 and also got high points. Probably that student’s answers were shared by four cheating students. But I don’t know if that student showed the answers to the four knowingly or not. Every time I found a cheating, I give the student punishment. But not only the cheating student, I also punish the student who helped the cheating. This time I am going to make the points of the four zero. But I need to be careful about how to deal with that one student.

   So, today was the fourth day of the spring semester in 2024. I didn’t want to get up early, but I awoke at around 4:30 a.m. Probably my body is still living in Japan standard time. I had been making PPT by 9:10 and left my room at 9:30 for the class. The first class of today was of listening for the second-year students. Since I realized in last semester, that the second-year students hadn’t learned basic things well, I decided spending more time for new words and mechanical practice this semester. What I tried through mechanical practice today was to make my students get used to make sentences of hearsay “Souda”.

   Today’s second class was of conversation for the first-year students. I went to a classroom at 1:20 p.m. and prepared for my teaching. The first thing I did was to connect the AC adopter to an outlet on the teaching desk. The AC adopter provides DC to my computer. Though the computer has battery inside, it doesn’t last long. Since I had two classes in the afternoon, I can’t help but connecting my computer to the outlet.

Let me skip the class activities that I had done in that early afternoon class. When the class ended, I found that my computer’s battery was very low. I realized that it didn’t mean that I could get electric even if there was an outlet. There are many connecting jacks on the teaching desk. They are for USB, VGA, HDMI, microphone, and outlet. But actually, some connections are unstable because of poor contact, and some are not connected at all. This time, the outlet didn’t provide any electricity to my AC adopter.

I moved to a different classroom for the late afternoon class, and fortunately I could get electricity from the outlet in that classroom. But there was another connection problem in that room, too; the HDMI cable couldn’t send audio data because of poor contact. So, I used two cables; VGA and audio cable. If the system on the teaching desk was built and checked well, a teacher doesn’t have to think about how to connect his/her computer to the system.

After the three classes, though I was tired, I went to a supermarket in the campus. I needed drinking water. I carried 10 litter with two 5-litter bottles. Then I scored quizzes, cooked my supper, and wrote this. Okay, now it’s the time to go to bed.

I got up in the morning before alarming because I still spend my days with the Japan standard time which goes one hour faster than time here. I ate my breakfast at 6:30. My breakfast is always leftover of supper in the night before.

I had a conversation class in morning hours. They are new students to me. They were surprised by hearing my age when I introduced myself. There are two classes in a grade in Japanese department. I taught a conversation course for one class yesterday, and for another class today. So, I did the same thing as yesterday. Teaching two classes with the same subject is good for me, because it reduces my workload.

  I gave them a quiz; writing of Hiragana and Katakana characters, Selections of particles (postpositions), sentence endings, and Ko-So-A demonstratives. Yesterday I thought the level of first-year students were low, but today I think it is still the beginning of a long journey of second language learning.

After the lunch, I went to the office of Japanese department and talked to the chief. And then dropped by the international exchange office to say hello. I came back my residence at 3:30p.m., took a long sleep till the evening because I was so tired.