Look! I wrote "gullible" on the whiteboard!

Whew! This week has been a busy one. I can hardly believe it is almost over... just one class separating me from the weekend! Wahoo! After teaching 14 long classes (9 of which I taught alone), I can barely muster up the energy to smile at students. That's really saying something. :) Perhaps this day is not the best to blog, but I want to share one special anecdote with you before I forget.

Yesterday after school, my fellow JETs and I met the International Club students for our weekly english conversation time. About ten minutes before the club started, Max and I looked at each other blankly: "what should we do?" A quick google search came up with this activity and we decided to go for it.

When all the students had settled down in the classroom, Max and I stood in front of them with our best serious-teacher faces and launched into a dramatic tyrade saying something like, "Yesterday, in the dark of the night, when all the doors and windows were locked, some hooligans broke into the teacher's room and committed a crime so heinous, so disturbed, so awful..."

We described, in great detail and with great drama, how two students had taken a bottle of soy sauce and "bombed" Max's desk. I have no idea where he came up with this idea (possibly this photo?), but we effectively made it seem like the worst crime in the history of humanity. Finally, I said, "Our sources tell us that one of YOU were responsible for this monstrosity!" (They have no idea what that means.) "No one is leaving this room until we figure out who done it!"

Then the students broke into pairs and came up with detailed alibis ("We were salsa dancing in Kyoto" was my favorite). When they were finished, each pair was split up (one of the students waited in the hallway) and individually interrogated by the rest of the students. The pair with the most discrepancies in their story was deemed, "guilty."

In the end, the students selected a pair of freshman girls as the guilty criminals and we proclaimed that they were sentenced to manual labor: cleaning Max's desk every day after school.

We then left the club and came back down to our office to pack up for the day, and not far behind came the two freshman girls... carrying a towel.

They were actually going to clean Max's desk!!

Between fits of hysterical laughter, I was able to tell them that it was only a joke and they were not actually Max's eternal slaves, despite having lost the game.

I love our students.