This Week, I Join Mystery Inc

In retrospect, the grocery list activity was perhaps not my best idea.  Or, at least, collecting the completed lists for marking was not a good idea.  I now feel like a cashier whose customers all want to price match, and didn`t bring marked flyers with them.  It`s funny going through some of these, though, because I gave some of them them shopping lists for things like lasagna or apple pie. They went through the list and tried to find the items just like they were supposed to, but then they also found the premade variety and added it to the bottom.  I`m so proud of my smart alecks!

I didn`t end up watching dodgeball.  I decided that I was going to start drawing my maps for next week`s conversation class activity first thing in the morning (we`re going to be learning about giving directions), before things got started up, and I got really into it.  Like, I started working when I got here before 8:30 (when morning meeting starts), and while I realized that there were about a grand total of three teachers in the office, I didn`t even know what time it was or realize that the morning chime hadn`t sounded until I looked at the clock and saw that it was 9:06.  I spent pretty much all day drawing maps (I`m only doing five of them, but they`re detailed, and I`m having fun with it), until about 2PM when the day felt like it should totally be over by that point and I so just didn`t care anymore.  Fridays without class are like that.

I made poutine for Friday Night Dinner, because I am Canadian.  And desperate.  Desperate enough to actually consider what I made "poutine".  Fries, yes.  They were frozen, but they were actually fries.  The "cheese curds" were a combination of bits of white cheddar (broken-up snack blocks) and pizza-grade mozzarella.  And I didn`t even know where to begin for gravy, outside of buying a roast and cooking it, so I bought a can of beef stew liquid (it`s not beef stock, because it`s thickened - the instructions are "cook beef and veggies and add to liquid", so it`s literally beef stew without the beef).  What I forgot is that beef stew is a base of beef juices and tomato, so there was less of a beef taste than what I expected.  It was still food, and it was still kind of poutine, but in the same way that Americans can buy that stuff that comes in a spray can and still call it "pancakes" (pancakes in a spray can exists.  I had to talk my roommate out of buying it in Florida).  I need to scour the foreign food store next time I go to see if I can get packet or canned gravy there.

Saturday morning was spent doing laundry.  Nothing particularly fascinating.  In the afternoon, I met up with another ALT in Tsu.  We went to Tsukannonji temple, which was incredibly underwhelming, and then had pizza.  Actual, honest-to-god pizza.  None of this grocery store nonsense with the broccoli and the shrimp and the mayo.  I love pizza.  Pizza and I are good friends.  I would probably write odes to pizza, or haikus if I wanted to bother counting syllables (which I don't).  As good as it was, though, I'm still hitting up a Domino's the next time I'm in a city that has one. 

Sunday was kind of a lazy day.  I had to walk to the mall for a couple of things, cook up what I needed for lunches this week, and do some cleaning.  I also made a decent amount of headway on the JET Japanese course I registered for, which just opened up on Thursday.  I`m really excited about this, because it`s a regimented self-study course.  We got the self-study books at orientation before we left, but with my (lack of) work ethic, there`s a huge difference between, "Here`s a textbook, study some stuff," and, "Here`s a course, each section has a test that has to be completed by a certain time."  I do much better with deadlines set by other people.

Monday was back to regular routine.  Nothing particularly exciting to report.  The only thing of note is that the second year teachers returned from the class trip to Nagasaki.  And they all brought omiyage.

 I did have an interesting conversation with my supervisor as well.  I don`t even know how we got on the topic, because it started with my cancelled plans to go to Nagano over the long weekend, but we ended up talking about murder mystery dinners and escape rooms.  She was very excited about both concepts (I found a site for a Japanese one in Tokyo, which she got really excited about because she had never heard of these things before, let alone knew they existed in Japan), and now I`m organizing a mystery party for my conversation class for our lesson before Halloween.  Not murder, though, because that`s inappropriate in a Japanese school.  I`m thinking a monster-themed robbery.  So I`m going to do some searching, see what I can find in free PDF versions of murder mystery kits, change the crime, and then see if I can`t dumb it down for non-English speakers.  This is either going to be Hell on Earth, or the greatest thing ever.  I`m not sure which yet.

Tuesday was my high school day at my special needs school.  They had a new student enter in the past week, so my class had two students!  

It was yet another self-introduction lesson.  Also, the fact that they were in the same class still means that I only had one class all day.  I spent my morning on Pinterest on my phone (until it died because I forgot to charge it), trying to find some DIY murder mystery kits that I could adapt, and my afternoon alternating between staring blankly at my murder mystery plans and staring blankly at The Monuments Men without actually reading anything.  This was my first day in the high school staff room (elementary and junior high share a staff room in another building), so I was something new and exciting for the teachers there.  One of the Japanese teachers (whose name I forgot about three minutes after she said it, but it starts with `A`) started to come over in the morning, and then stopped partway, and the following conversation took place (roughly):
Japanese teacher: Ah, the new ALT!  Does she speak Japanese?
Other teacher: I`m not sure, but I don`t think so.
JT: Oh.  I haven`t met her yet.  I was going to introduce myself.
OT: I haven`t really met her either.
JT: Screw it!  I`m going to introduce myself anyway!
And she did.  As I sit there, trying not to giggle because I may not speak much Japanese, but I definitely got the gist of that conversation!  Later in the afternoon, the same teacher stopped by my desk and asked if she could take me on a tour of the school.  I`d already been on a tour in the summer before classes started, but at this point I was debating the merits of stabbing myself in the eye with my pen just because I was that bored (exaggeration, obviously), so while I said, "Yeah, sure," all casual-like, inside I was going, "Ohdeargodyes."

Today I only had one class as well, but at least it was at my base school, so I have all of my materials and computer to actually do work.  And there is a LOT of work.  We`re heading into midterm exams in a couple weeks, so we`re wrapping up the lesson we`re on now, and then not starting the new one until after the exams.  The problem is that, due to holidays, some classes have more time with me before the exam while others don`t, so the teachers don`t consistently want the same things for each of their classes.  I mean, it`ll be more interesting for me than teaching the same lesson eight times in a week, but it also means I have three different lesson plans on the go for the same grade level.  So my morning was prepping all of those lessons for next week.  The entire afternoon was taken up with more plans for my mystery game.  I`ll probably have a post entirely devoted to that once it`s done, because there is WAY too much for me to tack it on to one of these rambles.