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Big smiles all around...
Feb. 16th, 2005 11:14 am...for the students I coached last week, who all passed their interview tests and got into their high schools of choice. This is a big freaking deal in this country, and very competitive. My face hurt from grinning with these kids, who all came up to me with glowing eyes to thank me for helping them. And really, I didn't do that much - just corrected their grammatical mistakes and ran through loads of practice interviews with them. It really is a confidence thing more than anything else, I think, because I have my doubts as to whether or not the people interviewing them are aware of correct English grammar in many cases.
I'm now teaching two private Japanese lessons - one beginner level and one 2kyuu level. It's actually quite fun, and I enjoy it much more than teaching English. It's fun watching my students catch on after I've explained something to them, as well as a great grammar and kanji review opportunity to boot. My father is hell bent on me being a university professor and takes this as another sign of the inevitable, but I'm not certain how similar the two are; after all, private students are much more motivated than people filling a language requirement in a lecture hall of 75 students.
In other news, damn microsuck and their insecurity patch 2, which has cursed my computer with a firewall I don't want and can't seem to turn off, with the added bonus of a system crash every 3-5 minutes. This makes computer gameplay and internet browsing hell. It recently took me over 90 minutes to limp through about 10 minutes of gameplay. Man, does that suck. Oh, and that thing where the service pack automatically wipes out my older version of windows media player and replaces it with a version that sends information about all the media files on my HD to microsuck and also sets itself "as the default player for playing your digital media content, including music, videos, CDs, and DVDs" in the process, thus causing winamp, quicktime, divx, and all my other preferred media players to crash in the bargain? Way not cool.
And finally, to all the ( Spanish speakers. )
I'm now teaching two private Japanese lessons - one beginner level and one 2kyuu level. It's actually quite fun, and I enjoy it much more than teaching English. It's fun watching my students catch on after I've explained something to them, as well as a great grammar and kanji review opportunity to boot. My father is hell bent on me being a university professor and takes this as another sign of the inevitable, but I'm not certain how similar the two are; after all, private students are much more motivated than people filling a language requirement in a lecture hall of 75 students.
In other news, damn microsuck and their insecurity patch 2, which has cursed my computer with a firewall I don't want and can't seem to turn off, with the added bonus of a system crash every 3-5 minutes. This makes computer gameplay and internet browsing hell. It recently took me over 90 minutes to limp through about 10 minutes of gameplay. Man, does that suck. Oh, and that thing where the service pack automatically wipes out my older version of windows media player and replaces it with a version that sends information about all the media files on my HD to microsuck and also sets itself "as the default player for playing your digital media content, including music, videos, CDs, and DVDs" in the process, thus causing winamp, quicktime, divx, and all my other preferred media players to crash in the bargain? Way not cool.
And finally, to all the ( Spanish speakers. )