Sara's school

I am the ALT for Shitakouji. I work with five teachers and sit by three of them in the teachers' office. My fist day of classes was on the 28th of August and since there are around 600 students, the grades are broken into 6 classes each. The grades are 7th, 8th, and 9th and are labeled 1, 2, and 3. In one week I will teach 17 classes. I had 4 classes my first day. The first was with class 2 of 8th grade (labeled 2-2). They were really quiet and shy to speak. However now, all the students in all the grades seem to have gotten used to me and often say hello or try to have a conversation with me.

Right now, when I don't have class, I am in the teachers' office and at my desk. I have to correct around 100, 4-sentence essays. The topic is 'My Dream' and the most common dreams are:

Boys: baseball, soccer, or tennis player.

Girls: nursery school teacher, or nurse.

One thing that I notice is that the Japanese textbook treats infinitives as prepositions. This is a little painful to correct since out of the 100 essays, only 10 have correct grammar.

Then after classes and correcting papers, I help a student practice for the Morioka speech contest. Most schools are participating in it and while Patrick has a lot of students to help, I’m lucky and only have one.

The contest is focused on being able to speak English. I don’t really know what the judges will be looking for in particular, but I have been trying to help out my student’s pronunciation.