Here's a little project that I put together in my free time. I call it the Monthly Eigo (Enlgish) Post, or MEP for short, and it's a newsletter I will try to put out every month or so for the students. If I can get them reading English and maybe learning something about American culture, then great. If some of the English seems a little strange to you, please remember the target audience is Japanese middle schoolers with only a few years of study. It isn't anything complicated, but still took the better part of a school today to put together, finding good images, getting everything just right. Now that I've got the format roughly settled on it should be easier to put out an issue. By the way, since I wrote "Monthly" in the title, I'm gonna have to try hard to crank out something interesting every 30 days. If all else fails, I'll just change the name to "Mike's Eigo Post". It's still MEP, you know. Well, here's hoping that A. I can keep it up and B. enough people take the time to read it.
You can d/l the word file of it from here (sorry, you may need to cut and paste):
http://angelfire.com/nc/frodaddy/mepost1.doc
In other news, one of my fellow teachers was flipping out today in the staff room. Turns out there is a picture of him from his middle school days in one of the textbooks. OK, maybe not that big of a deal but it was worth it just to see his reaction. And admit it, if you saw your picture in some school textbook, you'd probably act a little crazy too.
Also, somebody returned from Korea with some chocolates for everyone. But these weren't just any ol' plain chocolates, no. They were spicy, as in with hot peppers mixed in the chocolate. Oh course, he neglected to tell everyone this when handing them out. Fun! Also, an Australian student whose mother is from Ono left to go back to Oz today, he was on his summer vacation there and came to Japan to visit relatives and check out the school. He had to go back to make it to a rowing camp at his school. Oh, those crazy Australians. His older brother is still here through the rest of the week though. Finally, the kids in two of my class periods today were real snots, hyperactive, wouldn't shut up. The third class though, everyone was practically falling asleep. Great. Just another day on the job.