After I wrote my blog the other night, I finally operated on a strange hankering I’d been having for a little while to play chess again. I signed up for the free online chess club. It was very fun, although a little frustrating to see how much worse I was than I used to be. Unfortunately, it was also kind of addictive, so I might regret my decision later. I don’t think so, though.
Yesterday we slept nice and late, then me and Oli got some water, lunch and bouht him a second-hand bike. After some coffee and mamemochi and a little shamisen practice, it was already time for me to go to basketball. After a couple of hours of fun intense and unfortunately very humid basketball, I had the wonderful situation of coming home after some fun exercise to a delicious meal cooked by my wife waiting for me, followed by a nice hot bath. Oh yeah.
Unfortunately, the rest of the night was not quite as perfect, as I had to finish correcting my students’ essays so that I could have someone take them in to Kyo-tanabe campus first thing in the morning so my students would have time to correct them before their final presentation on Friday. The 3 or 4 hours it took reminded me how much better it was in general to focus on oral presentations this semester, which is much less work for me. Some of them were actually OK to mark, but the ones that really made it a chore were the couple where I had almost no idea what they were trying to see, but from what I could tell whatever it was it was not very good. However, it was pleasing to see that my emphasis on interesting ideas and supporting abstract ideas with specific examples seemed to have worked and many of the students did a much better job writing interesting essays than I had really expected.
