February, for Lack of a Better Title

Its been so long since I've written I almost forgot how to do this!

Let me start again by apologizing for the month plus its been since I last wrote here.  Its been crazy, so I hope you'll forgive me.  

The end of January and the first half of February were busy in a few different ways.  First, I was studying for the LSAT, which I took on February 12th.  Then we had to evaluate all of our adult students' English abilities and write progress reports for each student.  Then we had a week of Pen Pal classes for our elementary and junior high students.  All of those were much more time consuming than I expected.

John holding down the Pen Pal Fort

'Ooooh, pen pal letters!!!'

As soon as Sydney left Japan, I had to start working on OBC's progress reports.  I teach about 30 adult students each week, and each of those 30 students got an individual report from me. I don't envy real teachers who have to write quarterly report cards.  Trying to accurately judge a student's English ability without discouraging them or hurting their feelings is more difficult than I expected.  It took a week and a half for me to write all those reports, and for the next week, all of my classes started with my students asking me I ranking them as such in their report.  Of course, all of the students compared notes and tried to see who was the best at what.  It was high school all over again!  

Moe and Reina writing up a storm

These three kids are crazy.  Fact.

As soon as we finished the progress report process, we moved right into the elementary pen pal week.  I teach three elementary classes that did pen pals, and one class that didn't.  The class that didn't was apparently too old, but I don't really understand the logic behind that reasoning.  Anyway, OBC does pen pals pretty much every year with all of their elementary students.  This year was no exception.  One thing that does change from year to year is where OBC gets the American letters from.  This year and last year, OBC worked with Mississippi Heights Elementary in St. Cloud.  Sarah's mom teaches there, and she got the American students to write the letters. 

This is where Santa lives!

Sarah's kids laughing at my crazy
little boys being crazy.

 The way we offer kid's classes at OBC is pretty straightforward.  Preschool classes are offered at one time, elementary at another, and junior high at yet another.  So, when two teachers have classes at the same time, they are usually at least close to a similar level.  So, because when we do pen pal classes there is quite a bit of explanation needed, we join forces and teach our classes together when there is overlap.  In my case, I taught two pen pal classes alone, and one combined with one of Sarah's classes.   

Komei can't sit still long enough to
write a letter, so he had to stand!

The pen pal lessons were pretty fun to teach and I think our students generally enjoyed it too.  For the younger kids, we made a big letter with pictures, and the kids had to fill in the answers to questions such as, "My favorite food is____." and and "When I _____ my parents get annoyed."  It was pretty entertaining to watch 8 year olds explain what makes there parents angry.  For the older kids, we prepared a list of questions that they could answer in letter form.  We asked them what their favorite McDonald's food was, what Japanese thing they wanted to show to the American students, and other questions like that.  It was a lot of fun, but also a lot of work.  Below are some pictures of my elementary students

Yuki

Moe

Reina

Komei (he is crazy!)

Takaha (Also crazy)

Keito (captain of the crazies)

Kyohei

Ryota

During all of the evaluating and the pen pal-ing, I was also studying for the LSAT.  Hopefully when I get back to the States, I will have been accepted into law school and will start grad school in August.   Studying for the LSAT involved a lot biking to Starbucks and other coffee shops.  It seems the the Local Blend in St. Joe has spoiled my ability to study without a good cup of coffee.  I took the LSAT on February 12th in Tokyo, at Temple University Tokyo Campus.  It was pretty cool except for the test taking part.  I went to Tokyo the day before and stayed in a hotel overnight because my test was super early Sunday morning.  Super early here being a relative term.  I never start work before 9:30 am, so the 8:00 am start time was particularly painful.  The day before the test, I took a shinkansen to Tokyo station and arrived at about 3:00 pm.  I had a lot of time to kill, so I decided to figure out where my test center was.  I took a cab from my hotel to Temple University and found the test site in about 4 minutes because the entire campus appeared to be in one building.  That left me with a whole lot of time to kill before it got late enough to consider going to sleep.  So, I decided to go on an adventure.  I could see the top of Tokyo Tower poking over the buildings in the neighborhood, so I took off walking in that general direction.  It took me about 1.5 hours to walk all the way there (wouldn't you know it, Tokyo is REALLY big) and once I got there, I realized there was really much to do.  So, I looked at the tower for a couple minutes, snapped a few pictures with my iPod and started walking back to my hotel.  The walk to the Tower was simple enough, because I could almost always see it.  The walk to my hotel on the other hand, was a bit more difficult.  I had taken a cab to the test center and walked from there, so I didn't really know the exact direction I needed to walk in though.  A pretty good guess got me close enough to start asking directions at convenience stores, and after a couple hours of meandering, I eventually make it back.  I got dinner at a kebab stand on my home, and I am seriously going to miss the food here when I go home.  Good food id everywhere!!  The next morning, I woke up, took my test, and headed for home.  Since then, I have been slowly decompressing after a solid month of stress, so that is why I haven't written.