Today's Highlights

I woke up today with the same cold that I'd gone to sleep with last night, and I woke up as late into this morning as I had retired into the sneezy, coughy evening before it. This meant that I was late to work, but I was at my lovely middle school in Tamagawa and no one really minded, even though I had class first period.

The kids mostly floundered when they had to do on-the-spot presentations today, but one kid. Hiroshi, whom I adore despite his inability to heretofore display any real progress in English, he just stole the show. He had to talk about “a place I want to visit” and started out saying in Japanese over and over to himself, “oh crap! umm, a place I want to visit...place I want to visit...a place...” right up until I was going to give him a leading question, but just before I spoke he started going. All in one breath, he said, “I want to travel all over the world. I very much want to go to China and the United States, because China is the most beautiful country and the United States is the most popular country to visit. I want to go there and eat the country’s popular foods, for example American pizza, hot dogs and hamburgers.” I was totally bowled over: he was so good! That’s more than I can say in Japanese! I was so, so super proud of him. He had it in him the whole time! What a great kid. It was a great breakthrough for him.