Not a great day

Yesterday I had a stomach ache for most of the day. I blame the peculiar spring rolls that I got from the convenience store. As a result, I had a fairly light dinner, and I almost didn’t practice violin, but as it was getting late I felt better and managed to get a bit of practice in.

After that I read Japanese for about half an hour, with lots of enjoyment. I used an app that is aimed at lower intermediate learners, so I knew at least 95% of the content and thus I could read it almost like English. The app costs money so I just read the sample articles, but I think I’ll subscribe to the service for a month or two and see if I can read everything.

From there I read a fanfiction about a Harry Potter who had trouble living normally but was obsessed with transfiguration and was something of a prodigy. It was one of the funniest fanfictions I’ve ever read, and quite enjoyable. The author made several good points that I haven’t heard before, like “why would Harry disdain his relatives for being so normal, and then go to wizarding school and want to be as normal as possible?” The fanfiction is still in Harry’s second year but it updated three months ago so it might not be dead yet.

Today I wasn’t very hungry in the morning so I skipped my oatmeal. And I regret it. I’m very sleepy and hungry, which is kind of a strange combination. Fortunately I only had one class. It was a frustrating one though. The student that I worked with was being very slow, and I thought it was intentional because he’s quite smart, but now I suspect that he was just sleepy. The other teacher apparently didn’t have enough to do with keeping the other three students occupied, so he kept watching me teach, which made me a bit uncomfortable. This other teacher (who is part time and only teaches two classes, both with me) is a rather peculiar individual. His social skills are a bit off, and he also does some rather air-headed things. He’s very slow at a lot of things, and he doesn’t seem to have much experience teaching, even though that’s apparently his profession. All that to say, while I think he’s a nice guy, I don’t have a lot of respect for him as a teacher.

First he asked if he could translate things into Japanese for the student. This seemed mostly pointless to me since the student was responding appropriately, so I told him to go ahead even though I was probably visibly affronted. So he backed off. Then at one point the student was refusing to respond to me and I got frustrated and told the other teacher that the student wasn’t responding. The other teacher proceeded to tell the student all the answers to write down, and then told me that his response was good, and to continue like this. “So,” I asked, “I just tell him all the answers?” He replied affirmatively, probably indicating that he hadn’t really understood my question. So I got irritated. But anyway, after that the student did quite well even without me telling him the answer, so I think he was just confused about how to answer those questions (which is really not to bad, because they were basically translation problems). So now I have to wonder why I got upset.

Also since then I’ve been complaining internally about how much I don’t like this school and thinking about how great my school was last year. I’ve got a really negative attitude, and it’s a bad thing. How can I change my attitude about it? The teachers aren’t very friendly—I could try talking to them (but when? They’re so busy…). And I’m more busy myself.