As we reach the middle of June, it’s traditional that the main part of my job is staying awake.

Because June is a busy time at the school where I work, I often schedule projects that require the students to do most of the work while I pace around pretending to be attentive or I sit and work on personal projects.

The problem with the former is I end up drifting off while walking and just end up pacing back and forth, which is a waste of time. The problem with the latter is that it’s easy to get relaxed which means it’s easy to drift off to sleep.

The other problem is that eventually I have to sit and listen to the final projects. This starts out well but, at a certain point, the bad English and occasionally low voices leads to me slowly drifting off. I don’t fall asleep, I just go elsewhere. This often leads to puzzled looks when I miss the ending, ask them the change parts when they’ve already done so, or fail to take any notes and just assign a score based on the mood I’m in at the time.

(Note: If I’m in a bad mood I take that as subconscious proof that the speech was terrible even if I wasn’t consciously listening.)

Today’s problem was a little different: I didn’t actually care and neither did the students. My JHS 3’s were finishing and performing game shows. They had last class to write and today to practice and perform.

The problem is, there wasn’t much practice.

One group peppered their “game show” with facts that surprised one of their members. This meant, of course, that they hadn’t actually practiced and/or he was talking with a friend the entire time. I was more interested in his reaction than to their performance.

At the end of the term they get their Speech Contest assignments as summer homework. This leads to us hearing the same basic speech again and again and again.

That means that at the end of September. I’ll be pretending to be interested whilst trying to stay awake.