Today is the last day of classes for the semester, which means I’ve been teaching for an entire school year! In some ways it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, and in other ways it feels like an eternity.

Of course everyone is quite ready for the semester to be over, myself included. The past two weeks or so have been really really hot. Grades were also due about 2 weeks ago, so basically they have been pointless and miserable for everyone involved. The teacher’s room is cool, but the classrooms are swealtering; none of the kids can concentrate in this heat, and why should they since their grades were already due? Even the teachers are mostly over it. Today some of them were competing to see whose classroom was hotter.

I haven’t had many classes in a while, so I’ve been bored most of the time. Tomorrow I’m headed to America for a month long visit. I’m really excited, and could use the break; I need a chance to appreciate what it is I have here. I’m really going to miss my kids when I don’t see them for 4-6 weeks. They are really the only thing that makes this job worth doing.

The 3nensei continue to be hilarious for the most part. It’s becoming more and more evident how teenage-boy the boys are. One of them asked me “How many bust?” the other day. All of them have to quit club activities soon and start studying their lives away to prepare for the entrance exams they will take in the spring.

I’m becoming more and more fond of the 2nensei. One boy in particular is becoming one of my favorite students to talk to, even though he stubbornly refuses to talk in English. I don’t know what it is, maybe that he obviously really wants to talk to me all the time, but tries to pretend he’s really cool. The 2nensei girls are just really ridiculous, but they’re much more personable now that they are more comfortable with English. One of them kicked up my skirt today and then asked, in what I assume to be all seriousness, if foreigners menstrated. I don’t even know.

So, I will surely miss them. But absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that, right? I plan on getting a lot of prizes and taking a lot of pictures for them when I’m in America. I’m hoping that I’ll return from my vacation invigorated, ready to tackle another year here. Hopefully one that involves more travelling, more money saving, and more asserting myself at school now that I have a better idea as to what is going on.

Thanks, Japan. It’s been an interesting year. 来年もよろしく。