Talking Star Wars with a 2nd Year (~Day 128)

Here's a little peak of what the JTE at my base schools hands me at the first day of the week when I work at their school:

	月 (12/7)	火 (12/8)	水 (12/9)	木	金
1	2-2
2
3	2-3
4	2-1
Lunch	2-1	2-2	2-3
5
6

Today, I write this blog post as I struggle to stay awake due to a lack of things to do. My tethering app on my phone is broken for some reason, and so I can’t use the internet to work on other projects of mine. Anyways, today I am working from my base school, and was assigned a class on 1^st, 3^rd and 4^th periods with the 2-2 class, 2-3 class, and 2-1 class, respectively. At this moment in time, I’ve finished my classes already, and they turned out being quite good. In class, the teacher provided two questions to select from, and they had to write answers to them and present them to the class after about 15 minutes. The two sentences they had to choose from were:

Q: What is your dream?

A: I want to be a ________.

Q: Why do you want to be a ________?

A: I want to be a ________ to _________.

Q: Where do you want to go?

A: I want to go to ________.

Q: Why do you want to go to ________?

A: I want to go to ________ to ________.

This was actually a great day relative to what I usually do with my 2^nd year teacher. Typically, I’m doing nothing more than reading dialogue from a book and repeating new vocabulary twice per word. Today, however,  I was able to talk to each student about these questions, walk around the class to help answer questions, and learn more about each student’s aspirations.

1^st period with the 2-2 class went quite well. Class flowed properly and the students had some really creative responses. Their speaking volume was quite low, but that is understandable with folks who are shy and are still learning the language.

3^rd period was 2-3 was probably the most enjoyable. Before class started, I had a conversation with a kid who was sitting in the front of the class. I commented about his pencil tin, which had a graphic of the Millennium Falcon and as a result we had a short conversation about Star Wars. I asked him if he liked Star Wars and whether or not he was going to see the new movie on opening night, or if he was going to see it over the weekend. He confirmed that he liked the movies, and that he would see the new movie on the first Saturday of the movie’s release. Once class started, each and every student had great, creative sentences just like the 2-2 class, but some boys in the back made a joke out of the lesson. They said

“I want to be a ________ to be strong and sexy”.

It wasn’t just one student, but rather around 3-5 students who used this same sentence with some minor changes, like putting in “cute” instead of “sexy”. The whole class erupted in laughter, but I still appreciated the fact that they were willing to be creative and not stressed about the grammar, and that they used it correctly.

After class ended, the boy who had a solid conversation with me about Star Wars approached me and gave me a Yoda-shaped eraser. This was frosting on the already delicious cake of good classes. Man. This kid. So awesome. So kind. So bright. He also understood everything that I was telling him so I knew that his comprehension level was really good as well. Unfortunately, I still don’t know his name because I just have too many students and it’s difficult without having a chart or booklet to look at with their names and pictures on it.­

The Yoda eraser that was given to me by a 2nd year student after class ended.

4^th period is a complete other story. Generally, this class is the least-behaved and has the lowest level English out of each of the 3 different classes for 2^nd year students. One student in particular is very loud and confident when answering questions, and while his comprehension and English is good, his attitude about it is quite disrespectful since his demeanor in class tells me that he really doesn’t care, and he’s in a “too cool for school” phase. During lunch with the 2-1 class, I also did not end up speaking to the students very much. They just are not talkative and don’t have confidence in their English for the most part. There were a good handful of students who paused and had to sit down without answering the questions we prompted them since they just totally blanked without knowing what to say.