I'm Really Good at English

Yesterday was a good day. It began with me going back to school for the first time since winter break. I went to one of my larger elementary schools and taught three classes of 6th graders and two classes of third graders. My 3rd graders are energetic and motivated but almost impossible to control, while my 6th graders usually lack in energy but are surprisingly willing to participate and learn something new, despite being the “big kids on campus”. In a couple of months they’ll graduate and move on to junior high school I don’t teach at (one of the few). They’re bright for the most part, with a couple of English prodigies thrown in the mix, and I often cover more material with them in one day than I do with older, “smarter” junior high school kids in a month.

After school finished, I went back to the BOE for a couple of hours and worked on a running project with the head of the General Affairs Department. The City’s in the planning stages of building a new school that’s modeled after a private school in Boston, which means I’m doing some information translation and correspondence with the American school in question on behalf of the mayor of Kaga. My day-to-day routine is great, but from time to time I need a break from parroting sports and animal vocabulary, so the chance to put my (comparatively) amazing English fluency to use and be involved in an international educational undertaking of this sort is pretty sweet.

The English expertise didn’t stop there, though. After work I went to my weekly Hippo Family Club meeting, which involves a group of people who live in the area that meet regurarly to practice language skills, including everything from Portuguese to Cantonese. There, one of the members’ daughter had brought her application to do an exchange year in an American high school. English specialist that I am, I took one look at the forms and helped them shore up their free response sections so that even the most doubt-filled cynic will have no choice but to let the daughter go to the U.S. With a little review of basic slang, and some caution on what curse words to watch out for, she should be golden.