Most of this week was fairly productive in terms of lesson preparations and teaching. What did not go so well was trying to get approval for the translator for her work so that I could get an invoice. Why, you ask? Jasper, of course. I had to wait until this past weekend to get him to take a look at the translation and that was singularly difficult to do as his parents are in town. I went to them on Friday evening as they’re staying in a cottage in a town called Maarn. We spent the night there and I left on Saturday hoping that Jasper would have read the translation while I was in Amsterdam. But of course, if it’s not in front of him and you aren’t asking him to do it right at that time, he’s not going to do it. So it didn’t happen until I nagged him quite literally on Sunday. He felt that the translation was better than my English original, but that’s likely because he thinks Americans are always dishonest. While this was hurtful, as I tried to be very clear both in the English and Dutch versions of the site, I asked her to make the two changes he suggested and asked her for an invoice. Given that, I think that I will be using her services well into the future because I may need to reinvent myself again.
On Friday, I got some troubling news from my Japanese student. We had scheduled a lesson and as always caught each other up on what had happened since we had seen each other last. It turns out that she ended up in the hospital because she has been losing quite a lot of weight recently. She’s about five feet five from her and normally about 56 kilos and she has gone down to 43. She was diagnosed with Graves disease which is an autoimmune disorder linked to hyperthyroidism. I know a bit about hypothyroidism because of my family, but I don’t know too much about hyperthyroidism I looked it up and the symptoms are quite mild but then I looked up what you would have to give up in order to manage the condition and it’s literally everything that Japanese people eat: anything to do with soy, gluten, fruits that are acidic, and many other foods. But the most unpleasant piece of news is that she will have to stay in Japan until at least, September or October. And while it’s good for me because the lessons remain online and it saves me time, I wanted to get a chance to do some in-person lessons before we ended our package. The bright side is that we will remain friends and probably hang out more socially together. And her everyday life is not going to be impacted too terribly as long as she’s careful with what she eats. But she’s barely 30 and the diagnosis means a lot of modifications for her.
Yesterday marked the halfway point for my Imres incompany. As such, it was the first of the presentation classes that I will be holding. We had decided last week that because people were on vacation and half the class would be absent, we were going to divide the presentations into two days. I suspect that I will have to do that as well for the last two classes and so have made preparations. To whit what I have done is planned the class so that presentations are first, and then we fill in the time with whatever leftovers we have from the previous class, plus learn something new. In essence, I’m just running the class as if it was a normal class with presentations, as opposed to doing all the presentations at once. It’s a little bit more work than I planned but I think it will keep people calmer because nobody likes presentations. I figure they must like the format of the lessons because I have been asked to come back to Imres starting on 28 August of August. This will be a lower-level class so I expect a little bit more difficulty in lesson planning and engagement because this will be a lot more grammar-heavy. I’m gonna have to consult some other teachers for help because I’m going to have to figure out a way to mark their progress that isn’t a presentation or a test.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.