Summertime at school

Official, mainstream classes at my schools ended for the term in July. Beginning in August, the students have the closest thing they get to a summer vacation. While the commercial-track students didn't have to come to school, everybody else--the remaining 3/4 of the school--kept coming for extra classes. The earliest classes started at 7:30 for the top-level university-track kids, but all the other college-track students had classes from 8:30 until lunchtime. After that, everyone went to their club activities, and would practice until 5pm at the earliest.

Still, though, this counts as summer vacation here. The teachers are much more relaxed: we don't have our daily 8:20 morning faculty meeting, and the teachers who aren't in charge of extra classes pretty much sit at their desks like I do. I spend literally eight hours a day at my desk with nothing to do. Here's how I passed the time.

Now, I don't consider it time wasted. This summer I got all ambitious and decided to tackle the first Harry Potter book in Japanese. I stuck with it for about two weeks, spending about an hour each morning struggling through each sentence. In those two weeks, I got about five pages in.

After my daily struggle with Harry Potter, I'd practice Japanese in general. I've focused most of my energy this past year on practicing kanji (the writing), relying on immersion in general to teach me grammar and vocabulary. I've learned to use the frequent breaks in teaching (the week leading up to, the week of, and the week after midterms and finals, as well as the week leading up to field day) to plow ahead with my studying, and I'm pretty satisfied with my progress.

After that, I'd usually tinker with some lessons. Just as I imagined when I recontracted, it's much, much easier to revise existing lessons than it is to draw up new ones from scratch.

By that time each day, I'd start getting tired of Japanese. That's just as well, because three hours per day of studying and lesson planning took care of just about all the work there was for me to do. I'd spend the rest of the day reading prodigious amounts of material on Wikipedia, checking my email, Facebooking, and updating my blog. (That's what produced the slew of updates about the Bali trip, by the way.)

School not officially being in session means the teachers can take vacations without the guilt and pressure of falling behind. That means that, at any given time, about a third of the faculty was off the island. Another third was teaching extra classes, and the remaining third sat around the staffroom like me.

To break the monotony, I started bringing an apple to school, and picked a spot somewhere each day to eat it and soak up the view of the surrounding mountains.

I wanted to play the piano, but members of the brass band are up in the music room practicing from about 9 in the morning until 6 in the evening, every single day. Incidentally, most of them are very, very good at their instruments. I know it's harsh of me, but I find it hard to believe a few of them manage to stink as much as they do. Yet despite practicing at least four hours a day, seven days a week, an average of forty-eight weeks a year, several of them just can't hack it. Instead of changing to something new that they might enjoy more, though, they keep at it. Depending on how you look at it, it's a noble example of unfailing spirit, or a silly way to create stress instead of release it.