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This past year has been okay. Nothing much happened in the early part of the year other than being woken up early often by the noise of the construction going on next door. I went back to Canada in the early summer to pay a visit to relative whose health wasn't that good. If I go back in late February it may be the last time we meet. Summer this year wasn't typical. Not as humid or hot as I had hoped for. The fall was quite nice. I had the pleasure of showing the local sites to a friend who came to visit in late October. And in the past week, winter has struck with a bit of vengeance. One snowfall in mid-December (which was washed out by rain just prior to Christmas) and a couple of days of snow since last Thursday.
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On Wednesday last week, which was Boxing Day, I travelled up to Tendo to do some substitute teaching. One of the teachers at our school there had taken time off and gone on a holiday to Osaka. The day started off with an element of panic though as we got a phone call from our school in Yamagata asking if I could teach there too. A teacher there had come down with a heavy cold. I looked at the clock and said there wouldn't be time for me to get there on a local train. Would they pay for me to get there on the Yamagata Shinkansen? Yes. So I started off to get my car keys. A few steps from my apartment door, I got a phone call. At first I didn't realize it was my phone. I had gotten a new phone the previous week and that was the first incoming call I had received. Turned out they had fished up a Japanese teacher who could fill in. That was a good thing because if I had taught at Yamagata then they would've been on the hook to get me to Tendo...there were no trains which could get me there on time for my first class.
The classes in Tendo went quite well. I did laugh when a kid purposely switched some words in a verse he was reading. The look in his eyes gave away his ploy. He was trying to annoy me; the other teacher at the school scolds him when he does that - she has him on a merit system where he has to earn the James dollar he expects for finishing his lesson. When I pointed out that I saw what he had done, told him that it was good, and praised him; it was he who was left feeling annoyed. He wasn't expecting that.
The foot in mouth problem of the day came during the last class; two girls and a boy. There was one girl who is years younger than the other two students. She's a bit of an over-actor but not disruptive.
That day's lesson included a song which contains the lyric "It's my birthday today". For the first time ever I had a kid tell me that it actually was their birthday that very day we were singing that song. In this case it was the older girl. I checked, "Your birthday is today?". She answered, "Yes". Whoa! I wasn't expecting that. So I had the kids go through the song with some changes; the name of the child and the count of her age.
The next to last item in the lesson was a test. The younger girl reminded me of a girl who I teach in Yonezawa...perhaps a bit too much. When I handed out the tests I instructed the kids to write their names on the test sheets. The younger girl asked me how to spell her name...which wasn't what I had been calling her for the past half hour. Oops! Birthday girl got a laugh out of that at my expense.
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Nothing more to add here...so if you happen to read this post, have a happy New Year and all the best in 2019!
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