Life in general

What happened last week? I can't say I quite know the answer for you. Part of it was the fact that nothing really popped out at me as being especially blog worthy and the other part being that whenever I found myself in front of a computer with sufficint time, all that came to my head was "blah."

Ok, so I'll admit it hasn't been helping that I've been watching television shows on the internet. Those can be time consuming.

I honestly watch a lot more TV than I have for years back in the US. Of course, my actual TV hasn't been turned on for a month (possibly two months.)

Since I still don't feel like there is a horrible lot to talk about, I'll talk about my life in general, like how I am eating, what I am doing with my living space, and a little about my students.

It's funny how things change.

For a while, I felt like I found the grand solution to feeding myself by raiding the frozen food aisle. Now, that idea doesn't appeal to me at ALL. These days, I find myself buying some kind of easy dish that requires me to also buy meat and vegetables, cooking it on the stove and eating it out of my big bowl over rice.

Is it weird that I eat maybe 85% of my dinners from this same big bowl?

I haven't been cooking anything super sophisticated, but I think I am doing rather well considering that I am cooking only for myself.

Another thing that really changed is how I view my apartment. When I first moved in here, I looked around and I just kind of decided it was satisfactory because it was how my predecessor left it and I just kind of assumed she would have known better than me. Since then, however, I've changed little things (I put a table cloth on my table, for example) and I've realized that there are a lot of things I can do to like my living space even more than I already do.

I also want to start cleaning a lot more.

Of course, these things (cooking and cleaning) require a lot of initiative.

I went to one of my middle schools Monday, Tuesday, and Friday this week and the other middle school Wednesday and Thursday. This was an unusually great middle school week. At this time, a Friday evening, I can really say that I feel good about my middle school students.

Yes, there are rude kids who laugh when I try to strike conversation during lunchtime. However, there is also a 3rd year student who visited California, a class of 2nd years that totally crack me up, three 1st year boys that I have funny English nicknames for and a special needs class filled with students that seem to really appreciate me at one school. At the other school, there is a group of girls that like to visit me in the teacher's room during the afternoon break, stare over my shoulder, comment on my typing speed, and talk to me about random things. Not to mention lots of other good students at both schools.

This week, I did little interviews with some third year students at the middle school that I had previously believed to me a black hole for students with genuine interest in English. However, quite a few of these students really REALLY surprised me. One boy sat very straight and made great eye contact and only required me to repeat something again when I had purposely gone for a difficult question. One girl answered everything I asked quickly and accurately. There was absolutely no way she could have known the questions I was going to ask beforehand. With her, I started having an almost regular conversation, putting aside my list of questions I had prepared. It was really impressive. When their classmates are around, these kids can be so shy and so I never knew how good at English they could be. I know now that I have many, many more good students than I could've possibly ever guessed.

I suppose that's it. Hope this makes up for the lack of a post last week.