2004-04-23

It's Yer Birthday, Baby

Today was the birthday of one of my students. I thought about borrowing a guitar from the Campus Ministries dept. but got lazy. So I got onto my handy-dandy new copy of WinMX and did a search on "happy birthday". Amazingly enough, there WAS a recording of the traditional "Happy Birthday". I was sorta afraid that I'd only find Jay-Z singing Happy Birthday to himself with Kelly Clarkson or something. So I dragged my computer into the classroom and played the recording. I think the students liked it, and it embarrassed the heck out of the dude who had the birthday, so of course it was a huge success. I threatened the rest of them with similar displays later on. The next birthdays aren't until June, so I hope I remember. Oh yeah, one other weird thing about Japanese culture: A bunch of the guys threw a birthday party in the dorm last night. They started it at midnight, which I guess is technically correct since his birthday DID start at midnight. So anyway, they didn't get to sleep until 2 or 3 in the morning and thus were all bleary-eyed today. I guess we did stupid stuff like that when I was in college so I don't have room to rag on them excessively.

Ugh. Yesterday, I sat in a meeting for an hour and a half not understanding anything. I did get to work on a side-project I've been trying, which is memorizing the Sermon on the Mount. I worked on Matthew 5 all last week and got ALL of chapter 6 in the hour and a half. I've got the KJV on my Visor Edge so that's what I did in the meeting. I'm going to ask them to take me off, though. I can't understand anything anyway, so I don't feel comfortable actually voting--which they do.

Despite the long meeting of incoherent babbling, I've been on this job for about two weeks now and my verdict so far is I LOVE THIS JOB! The classroom stuff is challenging, particularly with the language difficulties, and I'm sure there will come some rough sailing in the future, but so far it's been great. I like being in a campus setting again, with all the programs and activities and such going on. And the one major source of anxiety before I started--the socializing part of the job--has gone remarkably well. The students have responded to me better than I ever imagined. And I sincerely enjoy having them in class. I'm actually looking forward to working with them more throughout the year. I don't know what they think of me, though. They probably haven't seen anything quite like me in their lives, so I do wonder just how effective I am as a teacher. I hope the difference doesn't end up being a distraction, like "So what crazy stuff do you think K will do today?"

Just wait and see, folks. Just you wait. YA AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET!