Oh God what a day. Woke up utterly buggered after a restless, nightmare-filled night. Spent the whole weekend making flash cards so am wiped out this week, but decided against taking a sick day 'cos my kids still need English lessons, this school especially. I have the 6th grade and another ALT has the 5th grade.
Got to (Tuesdays-are-often-Hell) elementary school, and my 6th grade sensei suddenly discovered that they don't have the DVD that goes with the textbook for my Elementary school classes, and unlike last year's textbook this one needs the DVD for a lot of the activities. So after I frantically do up a new activity set and search the English Room, it turns out the DVD was with one of the other sensei all along - though why a 5th grade sensei decided to hang on to it is beyond me. Either way, a whole lot of work wasted there.
Of course no-one had bothered to print off the flash cards I'd prepared for our current lesson either.
Had one of my scheduled lessons suddenly cancelled, which I found out about 5 minutes into when it was supposed to be starting.
The next lesson was with the difficult class for this school, the one with the homeroom sensei whose contribution to helping the Assistant Language Teacher is to sit at the back of the classroom and nurse what appears to be a perpetual headache. Seriously, it's like being an assistant to a corpse, while trying to teach 35-odd rowdy and/or apathetic kids in a language you barely speak. Anyway, after leisurely going off and getting the computer he didn't have ready to go, it turns out we didn't have a spare cable to plug it into the monitor anyway, so that was a bust. If it weren't for his absolute lack of giving-a-crap-ness it would have been really difficult; as it was he pretty much lets the kids run riot (and they would if I didn't keep things running moderately smoothly) so everything takes twice as long as it should.
Today's upside is one of my other sensei is awesome and has good kids this year, so we had a really good class there. But still, it's only Tuesday and I'm utterly wiped out, and it'd be really nice to have supposed superiors who could just have the basic stuff I need to make lessons work ready with a week's notice. What they'll do if they get a new, fresh-off-the-plane ALT in a few months when we ALTs change schools is beyond me.