Warming Brendan

It was the last day of school today before the spring holidays, but we did not do anything special. The others – Rushen, Flick and Katherine went out on the town last night, and were only just surfacing when we returned home – tried to convince Yoshimatsu-sensei that Ikehara-sensei had given her permission to take us all to a coffee shop for the lesson, but she did not buy it. The lesson was not too bad, though. In the afternoon, we wrote another composition, this time about our trip to Hokkaido. I managed to write a full page, which is a lot for me, since I do not normally know what to say. I could have written more as well, but I decided to stop.

I taught after school for Noriko again. Three classes of gradually improving English standards. I spent most of the three hours testing them all individually again: some are good, and some are worse. You can normally tell which ones are going to do well and which are not, but sometimes they surprise (or disappoint) you. The quiet ones tend to be better than the ever let on. The hardest part of the test was having to write comments at the bottom of each test sheet: what they could do to improve, etc. It was even harder than trying to mark there performance for each question on a scale from 0 to 3 (cross, triangle, circle, and double circle, though I was forbidden to use crosses) in the categories of "clarity," "memorisation," and "pronunciation." I eventually came up with a little system, though it rarely separated the good ones very much from the bad ones.

In the evening we had what was possible Brendan's new flat warming party. It was good fun; there were just the right number of people there. There was us, some of Nami's (Brendan's girlfriend's) friends, and Drummond's friends from the other night. Brendan's flat is big enough so that we all fitted in just nicely. We played drinking games, including beer pong, and 21's in Japanese. We sat around, chatted, listened to music, and ate (Shin, for example, bought some KFC chicken!). We had good fun, and I go to bed at 5am in the end.