For the teachers at our company the past weekend was a bit of a treat. We don't typically work on Monday and Tuesday was a statutory holiday observing the Emperor's birthday. Oddly enough, when I arrived at work yesterday and was asked how…

Well, in this case it wasn't so much a bet but more of a gamble. My co-worker let his students decide on what the penalty would be for him if he lost the end-of-class card game. He figured that he stood a pretty good chance of not ending u…

I used that question in pretty well every adult lesson I taught this week. The topic was last Saturday's earthquake. The first student I posed the question to mentioned that it was related to the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake of 2011. The…

Finally I got the class of deadly quiet kids to crack up and laugh. I was just goofing off a bit as I usually do when I use the food flash cards that pop up in a particular unit of the text. Usually I don't just say "Chicken" when I show t…

I was chatting up one of our young students prior to her class earlier this evening. She missed the first question by a small step.... "How old are you?", I asked and she replied "I'm fine". Okay. I let that one pass. I then ran her throug…

The weather forecast called for snow today...and they were spot on the mark this time. There probably was about 2cm of fresh snow on the ground when I left home to head to work. When I arrived in Kaminoyama there was hardly any fresh snow …

This year there was no Snow Lantern Festival. Though I had heard a couple of weeks ago that there was going to be a scaled down version with viewings by reservation only. I thought then that would be foolhardy venture but as things turned …

I was thinking of writing about a display I passed by today...but forgot to get to it after getting back from dinner. I was relaxing watching an episode from the second season of Bakemonogatari when it hit. My iPhone squacked with a short …

I had dinner with a friend last night. The conversation that night eventually strayed to the topic of learning English and my friend mentioned that a friend of hers in junior high school had taken lessons at the school I work at. I inquire…

I'm not sure if I wrote about the trial baby lesson I gave at the end of January...the one where my "student" was two months-old. That time, it was just me, the baby's mother, and the baby. I managed to keep the baby's attention for the fu…

"Setsubun" literally translates as "seasonal divider" according to a Wiki article. Though one would be hard pressed to find evidence of such a thing around here because the southern end of the prefecture got hit by heavy snowfall for most …