cooling off

This morning I stepped out of my door and it was...cool. And breezy. And...and not humid! And apparently the temperature, at least, is going to keep up its good behavior. This is not a drill! Misery season is officially over :D

That being said, of course the ONE day I actually wouldn't mind some hot summer weather, it's going to drop below 20 C and rain heavily. On Saturday a bunch of JETs are heading up to our prefecture's tanfastic water park / amusement park / outlet shopping center, and I was looking forward to gettin' my swim on in those pools. But I guess if I stay in I can take care of some much needed fall cleaning, and maybe...bake? Cookies sound awesome right now.

Just had the second lesson-planning meeting of fall term, and it definitely went better than the first. Experience, both during the past year and the past week, have taught me what pitfalls to look for in the first-year students' textbook lessons (confusing vocabulary, grammar or verb forms that are just tossed in at random and never explained, etc.), and I think I am getting a lot better at generally jazzing them up with engaging activities and visual aids.

Also! Soma FM has a new station, and I love it. "Suburbs of Goa" keeps me sane during the days when Creeper-sensei doesn't have nearly enough classes to keep him out of the office and out of earshot. I have a feeling it will also be very useful when proper flu season starts and everyone steadfastly refuses to blow their damn noses, opting instead to become perpetual snorting machines because somehow that's more polite and less disgusting. Right.

Yahoo had up a list of "Office Do's and Don'ts" that they snagged from CNN the other day, and it really made me pine, if not for America per se, then at least for a professional culture where everyone understands that it's NOT okay to kick off your shoes and prop your rank-nasty feet on the desk edge right next to your neighbor's face, or constantly belch and grunt and hum tunelessly (actually the more accurate term would be "tonedeafly," but I'm pretty sure that's not a word. Well it is now), or leave your phone at your desk all day without setting it to vibrate so that everyone gets to hear the nauseating pop song you set as your text message notification over and over and over again.

Yeah, it's the little things that get to you. But all in all this term actually doesn't look too bad - second-year culture kids are well taken care of with Grammar-sensei so no worries there; I have a fairly solid plan for third-year culture & they're good students to boot; and first-year classes are at least working out better than last year, if nothing else. They're really benefitting from Grammar-sensei's English class, so we don't have to hold their hands quite as much. I don't teach the class from which some students will move up to 2A Culture next year, but I would hazard to guess they'll be pretty alright. The total number of students enrolled for each year has been going down, as well. While that doesn't bode well in terms of Japan's aging population, at least it means smaller invididual class size, and that's better for everybody.