First Day

Awesome! Loved it!

I started the new job in the college today and really enjoyed it. I had three 90-minute sessions with the same group of 18-20 year olds - EIGHTEEN OF THEM! It was certainly VERY different from what I've been doing for the last three years, which consisted of mainly chatting to students or trying to keep them under control. Okay, I'm kidding - but it certainly felt that way a lot of the time.

All my college kids are hoping to go to university abroad next year, so they're pretty motivated. How they'll survive is another thing as a lot of them are wanting to do pretty tough courses.

Anyway, I loved the kids I had today. And yes, I would consider this bunch to be kids. They were surprisingly (for Japanese students) a lot more talkative than I'd expected them to be which was great - or every pairwork or group activity would have fallen on its face. And they were nice students and seemed to be enjoying the sessions.

For a highish level group though, I was a tad surprised at their lack of basic English grammar knowledge - things like using the past simple or past continuous were flummoxing them - really basic stuff.

The sessions flew by though. For me anyway, I hope it did for them too. I'm glad I overplanned the lessons. I abandoned a few of the activities I'd planned, but not too many. There was just no way of gauging before teaching them how long things would take.

I didn't enjoy the rush hour train in the morning but that's life! My biggest problem of the day was the stool I had to sit on. Or rather, perch on. My feet were KILLING me by the end of the day. I'm used to sitting when I work! And the stool had a life of it's own, I swear. Every time I moved away from it, it seemed to readjust its height, which meant I spent a lot of time discretely trying to readjust the bloody thing.

Oh. And I used someones mug. Being the new girl and all, nobody told me that people took their own mugs in and I used someone else's - they were very quick to point this out to me - so I poured my coffee away and washed it for them and felt right properly told!

And I was so knackered I crashed at 10pm. Except now it's 4.40am and I'm wide awake. GAH!