I just want to celebrate another day of livin',
I just want to celebrate another day of LIFE!
-- Rare Earth

Yesterday was the last day of classes. Now I embark on the journey of grading final exams, submitting my gradebook to the administration and enjoying a bit of freedom from now until the start of the new term in April.

It's been a tumultuous 4 months -- teaching the unwilling. Kids sleeping in class, not showing up, being rude, etc... etc... etc.. Anyone who thinks that Japanese people are quiet, polite and hardworking..... HA!!!! Hahahahahahaha!!! hahahaha! No, my friends. They are no different than you or me or the kids next door. I teach the willing and try to tolerate the ones who are there only because their parents want them to be (yes, this IS a college, believe it or not). But the principal used to be a high school principal, and seems to think that governing a college is the same...

Anyway, I was mildly heartened to receive three "bonus project" papers yesterday, that the students had no compulsion to do -- but I told them that a well-presented paper could earn them up to 10% added to their final grade. E.g. If you're pulling a 75% average and hand in a good bonus project paper, you'll finish the semester with 85%... That's going from a 'B' to a 'A' just like that!

Now the real work also begins: I need to design a new course for next semester (I'm thinking: "English in mass-media communications") and decide which textbooks I'm going to use for the year for all my courses and get them ordered for the new term... The current ones are awful as they were chosen by my predecessor and coming in, I had to deal with what the students already had. As a result, I didn't have them crack open those books all semester -- I used all my own materials... Waste of their money, I know, but really they wouldn't have learned anything from them anyway.