Tohoku Gakuin University continued 3

The language lab prep room is nicer than the teachers' room but there is less in it. It is actually an office, but behind the partition on the left there are two sofas for teachers, plus they have the latest issue of an English paper, The Daily Yomiuri, the same paper that I used to get. They also have current copies of Time, a French weekly and a German weekly. I usually arrive long enough before my class that I can read them. I do not get much out of the German, but I can read a bit of the French.My classroom is one floor down and directly under the prep room. I teach a course in pronunciation, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and some vocabulary with occasional speaking activities. The room is equipped with all sorts of fancy electronics, but I only use a tape recorder that has speakers in the ceiling. I spend a lot of the class time sitting in this chair running the tapes, but I spend at least an equal amount of time walking around the room, checking on what the students are doing and interacting with them.
I have two 90-minute classes with a 10-minute break between them. Both classes are first year students in the English department, but they are streamed and the first class is of a higher level than the second. At the end of the second class I asked the students if I could take a picture of them for my blog. They got all excited and posed for the picture. I took two but could not decide which to show you, so you get both.

As you can see, the class is coed, as is the first, but there are more women than men. They are all 18 or 19 years old and, as is normal with Japanese, they less mature than Americans of the same age. They are a lot of fun to teach, though.

After class, I usually walk home. It takes about a half an hour. On this day, however, Kyoko was here with her car so she came and picked me up. It was nice having a ride to school each day while she was here, but I felt that I was not getting enough exercise.

Kyoko and Tsubasa have returned to Tokyo and it seems very quite here. While he was here, Tsubasa learned to open cabinet doors. Kyoko said that Sunday, the first day he was home, he opened a cabinet for the first time and broke two dishes.