The Devil and Goody Proctor again.

They were pretty good again today, but I’m nonetheless all annoyed at the Devil.

One of the other classes’ homework was to write “Sarah is the worst singer” three times. (The school is too cheap to buy the workbooks we’re supposed to have, so that’s how homework is assigned here - the older kids copy sentences, the younger ones words. Not all the homework mocks my singing, but some of it does.)

One girl, Kitty, did this and then wrote “The Devil is the best singer” seven times. I saw them playing together after class and asked Kitty, “Who is the best singer?” She hunched her shoulders and glared at me. It was cute.

It should be noted at this point that Kitty is one of exactly three students I have who is even mildly overweight, and that as one might expect of a Japanese middle-schooler, she seems to be kind of sensitive about it.

I’ve drawn little pictures of some of the kids’ faces to use in games. Today I’d written a sentence with blanks in it on the board: “____ is ____ er than ____ .” I gave Goody Proctor and the Devil some flashcards with nouns and adjectives on them, plus pictures of their faces and mine, and had them form sentences with them.

Goody Proctor spotted the pile of other people’s faces. “Who are they?”

I held a couple up and named them. “Oh,” said the Devil excitedly, “Do you have Kitty?”

I did, and gave her the paper Kitty. She carefully formed the sentence, “Kitty is heavier than Goody Proctor and the Devil.”

So though she did not overtly misbehave today, I’m somewhat less than thrilled with the Devil right now.

(Goody Proctor did “Sarah is heavier than Goody Proctor and the Devil,” but that was pretty inevitable. I’m just surprised neither of them thought to work the “fire engine” or “police car” flashcards in there.)

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Oh, and,

Somehow or other, a four-year-old whose Mom is thinking about enrolling him ended up sitting in on my class with Mr. Wow today. I’d been told his Mom would just be out there watching, but nope, they sent him into the classroom.

Mr. Wow is named both for his fondness for the word “wow” and for his habit of surprising me by how quickly he catches onto everything. He’s only six, but he’s on about the same level as most of the eight- and nine-year-olds. And I’m thinking of speeding up his lessons some more, because I end up running out of activities before class is over.

So the four-year-old was totally lost, so I finished up Mr. Wow’s stuff early and spent the last twenty minutes on simple games he could join in. (I think four-year-old’s Mom’s actually already decided to enroll him, but I don’t feel I know him well enough to assign a blogname yet.) If I’d known about this in advance, I’d probably have been worried that Mr. Wow would be a little stuffy about the kid in the room - he knows he’s smart, because adults tell him so all the time. But Mr. Wow was awesome. He was totally a little nanny, helping me corral the kid back into the room when he tried to run outside, offering him toys and showing him how to play the games and everything.

Our vocab for the month is injury-and-disease-related words: “I have a [cough, headache, sore throat, etc.].” is the sentence they’ve got to get down. When we were doing coloring at the end of class, four year old kept up a constant stream of chatter about what he was doing to his sheet. Mr. Wow commented to me in Japanese, “He’s pretty noisy, isn’t he.”

“Yeah, well, he’s four.”

Mr. Wow nodded - and I think he actually understood the sentence. He said in English, “I have an earache!”

And basically I laughed at that for the rest of class. (Shut up, this is really impressive. I’ve never had any of the other kids his age make a joke in English.)

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)