First 2 days of school

Yesterday I had to give two speeches. The first, which was entirely in Japanese, was to the staff of my base school. I had practised what I needed to say, so it didn’t sound so amateur – but I also don’t want my speech to be too good, because I don’t want people to think my Japanese is better than what it really is (which is next to no Japanese at all). I had to give the same speech again today at my Tuesday school – this time I had way more confidence, so I think the staff seemed a little confused at the part where I say “I cant speak Japanese, so please be patient”…or something, or maybe im asking people to wish me good luck with learning? – im not sure as the supervisor wrote it for me as a rough translation of what I actually wanted to say… Anyway, so that was a little odd – but I hope people were laughing with me and not at me, although I wasn’t really laughing, I was just pretending to be enjoying myself. The second speech, was in front of the entire school. About 700 or more students including all the staff – I bowed a lot. It was a bit scary I guess – its been a while since Ive stood up in front of so many people like that. This speech was a mixture of Japanese and English. I figured Id say a few introductory lines in Japanese… and then say a bunch of stuff in slow English.. This time my Japanese wasn’t so good – obviously my nerves got the better of me and I told the entire school that I am from England in London (in Japanese – they say it the other way round – so you can see how I messed up so easily right?) Although giving speeches was a bit of a rush in the morning, I wasn’t given any lessons to teach yesterday, so had to go back to just procrastinating in the school office from 10-4.15. I am getting VERY bored by this point. I’ve had almost a month of procrastination. I’ve lost the motivation to self-study Japanese as the boredom had turned to frustration – and the text book ive been trying to learn from is seriously awful. Having said this, I have managed to teach myself how to read katakana in the space of about two weeks. well, theres a couple of characters I haven’t covered yet… but its really exciting that I can suddenly read the labels of everything – and shop signs etc. I think I need to start taking real lessons – because trying to learn whilst sat at a desk alone is boring. I really need to study though – its not so easy to just pick things up. Today, Tuesday, I FINALLY FINALLY got to teach. It was great – loved it – LOVED it!!! It’s a shame I only have 2-3 classes a day – because I still had to waste a lot of time procrastinating. I cant wait for things to have kicked off properly – I want to be busier than this. I want to be marking work doing MORE. I always thought I preferred being lazy over busy – but I’m starting to think otherwise.