7 pm

My new computer

It’s 7 pm and I’ve finished my prep for tomorrow. I couldn’t believe it. After midnight is normal. When I talk to non teacher friends about this online teaching life, they say, “All my friends who are teachers are saying exactly the same thing.” That’s reassuring. I’m not a crazy workaholic. There’s been a slight uptick in corona cases in Tokyo. I hope we won’t be teaching online until the end of the school year early in 2021.

I do occasionally enjoy this teaching. I get less stage fright than when I’m in front of 35 students for one thing. But there have been so many panicked moments. We had a clap of thunder above the house and it shook. And then a small black hole appeared on my screen. The next morning it was spreading slowly. I got a new computer and found out it doesn’t take 20-30 minutes to get onto Zoom - more like one or two minutes. Then I found Adobe wasn’t on the new computer. Agh! More retyping of materials! But I got it back.

I have a stack of mid-term tests to grade - except on email, it’s not a “stack.” But I’m just about past the halfway mark for this term.