The Feel of Nagasaki

My sleep schedule is fixed! I went to bed at 23:00 on Sunday and woke up at 7:00 rested and energised. Unfortunately, I had a little cat sleeping on me who refused to be moved meaning I still had to lie in bed for half an hour until she allowed me to get up to shower.

I mentioned in my last blog that I hit a mental roadblock and spent one day just prepping four lessons worth of material for one class. I did the same with my reading class on Monday. It’s the class I’m most familiar with and has a lot of great materials (if anyone wants a review of Reading Explorer Foundations I’d be happy to do one!) so I always enjoy prepping for it.

I’ve been somewhat cursed by USBs, external hard drives, and even computers breaking on me this last year, which has meant that while most teachers can reuse their slides and materials, I have to make a not-insignificant portion of them all over again.

I’ve started getting around this problem by using iSL Collective to host some of my worksheets and video lessons. If you’re an English teacher I’d strongly recommend checking out iSL Collective to see what other teachers have made. I’ve found some of my favourite classroom activities on that site and more importantly a lot of stuff that really intuitively helps students grasp new grammar.

It wasn’t just material prep I was doing this week but syllabus prep for next academic year too. I meant to get a head start on it last week but we use a particularly fiddly data entry system for syllabi and class grades and I ended up overwriting all of my Film class data with a different class’s data and decided I could wait until after the weekend to get it done.

On Monday we also went on a Lost and Found quest. My wife lost a small box of sewing notions on the tram. I’m used to the UK where something being lost on public transport means it’s lost forever, but we headed to the first tram stop and checked if they had it in lost property…

… they didn’t. They directed us to the main tram depot at Urakami. Who checked through their lost property department and when they couldn’t find it called the tram stop at Hotarujaya (the other end of the line). It was honestly kind of nice to see the other end of the city, and more importantly, get the box of notions back.

The rest of the week went by in a bit of a blur, I attempted more syllabus prep on Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday I was rushing around prepping exams, quizzes, finding a copy of The Truman Show for my film class (I ended up borrowing it from the head of the German department) and sending emails to the exchange students who’d offered to help me and another teacher with our research project. We’re using Mausritter as a framework to revise grammar points and to keep us from rushing around the classroom we've been using exchange students as our Game Masters.

As I think was the case with most people, the weekend was more fun. The colleague who I’m working on a Mausritter project with invited me and my wife to join a D&D one-shot. The one-shot has lasted three sessions. We reached the climax of the game today which culminated in a boarding action between two sky ships. It was incredibly fun and hyped me up for the game I’ve been running for my wife and our friends. I would honestly call myself a “Forever DM” and I’m more than happy with that, but getting to watch other DMs gives me ideas and techniques to improve my own skills.

We finished off the week on Sunday. My wife has an exam on Tuesday so spent Sunday (and I quote) “studying like ‘woah’,”. I used Sunday to do some laundry at our little backstreet coin laundry.

There’s a phenomenon of people going abroad and being disappointed and put out by the mundanity of the world as opposed to the view of it in their head. I firmly believe the opposite is also true.

I love how backstreets in Nagasaki look, I love the trams, the criss-crossing powerlines, I love the narrow streets, I love walking through a modern street and then coming across a shrine or temple. I love everything about this city. A nice little walk through backstreets and getting to lean on a wall outside a laundromat staring at powerlines as if I’m a background character in Evangelion is something I find refreshing and energising.

Our final act on Sunday was to go to an Indian restaurant. It’s my birthday on Monday, but that’s going to be a busy, busy day (I’m planning the game session for the Mausritter game I’ll be running on Tuesday). I’ve gotten Indian food on my birthday every year for I think the last 15 or 16 years, but it’s been especially special the last five years as we’ve been going to a restaurant called Taj, which is the restaurant me and my wife had our first date ten years ago …