カテゴリー: Uncategorized

My lower back is aching. Even when I am teaching in a classroom, I feel it aching. The cause is clear; long hours of sitting and lack of exercise. I am always sitting on a chair to prepare for my classes from getting up in the morning to going to bed in the night. And I don’t play any sports. These days I feel a lot of pain on my lower back and thigh. The lower back pain comes from long hours of the same posture, the pain of thigh is caused to support my weight on a chair.

In order to solve these problems, or in other words, in order to continue to work, I started to work with standing from today. Actually, this was what I did in the years of on-line teaching during the pandemic. I put two chairs on the desk. One chair doesn’t give me enough space to place the computer, the keyboard, the mouse, and two backup hard-disks. Working standing is not so bad. I recommend this way if a person has lower back pain.

Today is the forty-first day of the spring semester 2024. Since the day time today was filled with beautiful spring atmosphere, I went outside campus and bought 5KG of rice, 1KG of dried Udon, and big package of tea leaves.

Today is the thirty-sixth day of the spring semester 2024. I have one class before noon. That is for the first-year students. I made them “chorus repeat” before the pair activity of the day. Their voice in Japanese sounded good, but I thought that good students speak loudly, and no-so-good students speak in small voice. When they said an I-adjective predicate in past-negative, I could hear that some voices saying “Oishiikunakkata”. It must be “Oishikunakatta”. It may seem to be a small difference in written alphabet, but for the ears of native speaker, it is very different. “Oishiiku” has two possibilities; the one is that a student doesn’t understand conjugation of I-adjectives, the other is that a student has tendency to elongate vowels.

Usually, I cannot do anything in Tuesday afternoon because I keep working through the weekend. Today, too, I didn’t want to do anything, But, before taking nap, I handwashed two white shirts. There is a washing machine in my room. The university provides the machines to foreign teachers. The machine has the major German company’s name on top. And it amazingly uses less water comparing to washing machines of Japanese companies. Probably the design philosophy must be quite different between German and Japanese electric appliances manufactures. But one thing is common to both; washing machines cannot get rid of dirt on the collar of white shirts. I mean the inside of collar that neck touches. That is the part that can be most dirty on a white shirt, and the second is inside of cuff.

If I wash white shirts only by washing machine, collar and cuffs continue to be dirty. There is a good way; handwashing. I brought a soap from Japan, which is exclusively for handwashing. Its name is “Utamaro” having green color and nice fragrance. In this afternoon, I washed white shirts by my hands using “Utamaro”. I’d say it’s fun because I can do what a washing machine can’t. Of course I couldn’t make it perfectly white, but dirty collar and cuffs did amazingly become white.

Not only white shirts, I handwashed a cotton hat recently. “Utamaro” made a little old and dirty hat clean. The hat is light and has bright color suitable to the spring season. Walking outside with that hat on my head makes me feel good. So, if I had time to do so,,,,,,

Today is the thirty-fifth day of the spring semester 2024. I have three classes; the two for the second-year students and the one for the first -year students. I made my students do a pair-work in the latter that is conversation course. Actually, this activity is a kind of preparation for the final examination. I told this to the students so that they would do the activity seriously. Now it is the one-third point of the semester. I am planning the same activity at the two-third point.

The procedure of the activity is as follows;

1. Teacher’s explanation

2. Collecting students’ mobile phones

3. Showing a rough script that has many blanks

4. Drafting a script by students

5. Returning mobile phones

6. Recording conversation by the pairs

7. Sending the audio data to the teacher

The reason to do “2.” is to stop students’ use of translation software on mobile phone.

The activity was done at the end of the class. Time was only 30 minutes. I have got some knowledge for the testing procedure through this pair activities of conversation. Today, I don’t have time to write about the result, and I haven’t evaluated 14 audio data yet. I will listen to the audio data and use them as individualized instruction for each pair and each student.