Please open your textbooks

Today also marked my return to the classroom, it had been over three weeks since I had a class. Good to feel productive/useful again, after many days of only sitting at my desk and tyring to be busy, but not really having anything to do. Because I am an assistant teacher (read "not-in-charge"), and my co-English teachers were extremely busy this week with their homerooms, it was difficult for me to do lesson-planning on my own.

Two of my three co-English teachers are new (both lovely young ladies), and I must adapt to their teaching styles. One of them, Mika, is starting her first year teaching, and is quite nervous. A humorous moment today in our first class together, in which I, not wanting to steal her thunder, kept deferring to her to lead the lesson and she kept looking back at me lost, unsure of how to proceed. I felt a bit bad for Mika at the beginning--when she greeted the class no one said anything and seconds later when I tried, they nearly knocked the both of us down with their cumulative "GOOD MORNING MICHAEL TEACHER!" (the students all know me from last year of course).

It will take a few classes, but we will get there. I am a lucky man to have such patient and flexible colleagues.