Work Update

Monday, November 12
The day of the school visit from the Board of Education arrived. I pressed a professional outfit the night before and arrived at work early to discover that the other teachers had similarly broken their patterns of casual (track suit) dress code and lazy arrival: the entire staff appeared before 8:00 am in their good suits.

I spent the morning marking papers and gathering my materials, nervous for the visit to my class, for the criticisms they would inevitably have to make. When fourth period arrived, I walked to class early with my co-teacher, and we began class as usual. Only in the last fifteen minutes of the period did the BOE representative arrive, though members of the English department and the head of the first-year teachers observed my class from the start.

The class went reasonably well, though the class encountered some difficulty in understanding the instructions since my co-teacher had lost her voice. I wound up circulating the room, whispering directions in Japanese.

I wound up never speaking with the representative, though he seemed to enjoy participating in the pairwork activity with a much-abashed female student. I later learned that an evaluation meeting was held after classes—I was never invited—at which our school received a good review. I breathed a sigh of relief as our Vice Principal informed me of the good news the next morning.

Chris drove down to Miki that evening, having forgotten his wallet at my place. I cooked tonjiru for dinner using the daikon from the cultural festival.

I was anxious about Japanese class that evening, having previously been paired with a woman who scolded my inability to read a newspaper headline. I was thus thankful to work with a new, more forgiving tutor. We talked briefly about grammar patterns before chatting about Japanese novelists and Hawaii.