Yesterday I taught my second-to-last class, which was in essence the last class I had to prepare much for, since the final class will be almost entirely my students presenting their final project. Sawa and I did a repeat of our Amherst presentation from Thursday, and it went well – better in some ways, worse in others. It seemed a little off-topic in my class, which was all focused on learning English through movies and music, while in the Amherst class it was totally in line with what they’d been learning. However, in my class, I’d prepared my students for the idea of participating in class and everything, so they were much better abou participating in the discussion.
When we got back, Sawa and Oli and I had a nice but somewhat expensive meal at Yoshikura just down the road, and then Ranbo, Hayao and I had a kind of mini-dorm meeting. Ranbo and I had been a little uncomfortable about the fact that this girl Akina wanted to come live with us and for whatever reason, Hayao kind of pushed through the idea of her coming to live with us. Ranbo and I were both not too thrilled, but we didn’t really have much we could say and Hayao was strangely passive-aggressive about the issue. I got a little uncomfortable lately though with Akina seeming like she wanted to come in and dictate where she would stay and stuff, so we wanted to at least make sure we decided what the conditions would be, like where everyone would stay, what, if anything people would pay towards the internet and daily items and such. Ranbo and I are still a little unsure if it’s a good idea to let her come and stay, but at this point it’s too late to rescind our offer, so we’ll just have to hope things work out OK.
Today, Oli and I went to this play with two free tickets my Noh teacher gave me. Like last time, it was fairly boring, although it was a little more interesting now that I’ve been learning it myself for a while. There were a couple of parts that were very intriguing, like when, after about an hour and a half of fairly boring Noh, this little kid’s voice started singing and Oli and I thought “where the hell is that coming from?” It turned out, this little 6 or 7-year-old kid had been hiding silently inside this little on-stage prop the whole time in this cumbersome costume, just to bust out this role for the last 5 or 10 minutes of the play! Also, in the last play, they suddenly started getting all hardcore and this demon appeared and started jumping around and swinging a sword in a much more exciting manner than the excruciatingly slow dancing earlier, which was kind of exciting. For much of the time, though, I worked on my own JLPT Level 1 pracice exam. I ended up getting about 55%, whereas I need 70% to pass. However, it’s multiple choice with four options, so really the minimum possible score is about 25% so it would be more accurate to say I got 20/75 = ~27%, while I need 35/70 = 50% to pass, so I’m about halfway there. I did pretty well at the reading comprehension, and it was mostly the kanji and the idiosyncratic grammar constructions I need to study, but fortunately those are the kinds of things that you can mostly study for mostly by quantity without needing a good overall system.
After the Noh play I went straight to this basketball uchiage (end-of-season “send-off” party), which was god fun. Now, I’m quite looking forward to the idea of having a nice, unscheduled morning and afternoon tomorrow, with only some basketball and cooking in the evening!
