for some reason, quite a few disparate lines of thought have been popping into my head over the past few days. the other night i went into my local convinience store, which carries a limited selection of manga books, many of them naughty. one featured an impossibly large breasted young woman on the front, so i picked it up, expecting to be able to report that the woman in questions loses her blouse in several "unexpected" and "humorous" ways. unfortunately, the scene i opened the book was not "humorous" in any way whatsoever, lacking even the shallow nudity humor i was expecting. how can anyone enjoy crap like that? it rather shakes my faith in the basic goodness and decency of humanity.
i've been asked a couple of times via e-mail about "work". well, i'm finally going to the junior high regularly, but i haven't really started teaching classes yet, so i can't really tell about the classroom aspect of things. tuesday, i brought my computer to work, and mainly sat around the teacher's room following various baseball games, writing e-mail, and surfing the web. around 4pm, as i was getting ready to pack up and leave, one of the english teachers came and asked me to help a couple of speech contest entrants with their speeches. i was somewhat chagrined, as i had been doing a whole lot of nothing for the entire day, but all the kids are zealously preparing for sports day saturday, which leaves no time during the regular school day for actual school. basically this speech contest apparently involves memorization of an english story, and recital of the story. so working with them, aside from the pronounciation aspect (being only second year students, they still speak with thick accents), it's a lot like memorizing verses for bible quizzing...i made an md of the speeches for one of the students on monday, so i hope that helps. and i divided each student's speech into chunks, telling them i expected them to memorize a few sentences every day. hopefully, they'll practice diligently...i have no idea what to expect with the speech contest, not having attended one before, but in any event, it's excellent english practice. one of the speeches is a bastardized version of o. henry's "gift of the magi", ending with the line "they were the happiest couple in the world." not exactly true to the spirit of the original story... :-D
my official debut at the elementary school thursday seems to be a success...i did more work there in one day than in the four days i was at the junior high. basically, i went to various classrooms (one per period) and gave a self-introduction, then either helped teach some english, or played a game with the class (my last class period before the english club, we played dodgeball.) mindful of the warning that a spoken self-introduction, with no classroom interaction, would get old really quick, i gave some basic facts ("my name is glenn harper. i graduated from georgia tech, where i studied japanese, and majored in computer engineering"), and then had the class ask me questions, like how old are you (they always seemed to start out guessing that i'm over 30...it's the beard that does it. that, and my halitosis.), what are your hobbies, how tall are you, etc. a couple of classes i got "how much do you weigh?", which i let them guess at, but never told them the answer. after four periods of that, and one learning how to make corn soup, i was pretty tired. i had a 25 minute break before english club, and i ended up nodding off a couple of times. then came english club, where the head teacher taught some introductory phrases, like "my name is...", "my hobby is...", and "i like..." and then we made origami cranes. to see mine, supported by a gift that a friend brought back from england, click here.
the rest of my days have been pretty uneventful, really. mainly reading and playing guitar, as well as responding to e-mail. i've actually been getting a good deal of non-list mail from friends lately, so it's gonna be a while before i can sift through the current backlog.
been listening to: dark tranquility, king's x, radiohead, in flames, run dmc, and mineral.
