A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops

This week I finally remembered to try to get pictures of Ayano`s face. She turned four last week - fortunately, we celebrated her birthday together as it didn`t stop her coming to school - we wrote the name of her town in primary colours in her new notebook. She was more excited than she should have been and reminded me of my own love for new stationery. I must get myself some new biros soon.

Her pending maturity prompted me to attempt to capture her youth, but, being Japanese, she can`t have a camera pointed at her without doing something stupid with her hands. I hope you can appareciate than when she`s not precociously posing, she`s one of my favourites. That said, aside from Ryusuke, almost all my students have been a favourite at one time or another.

This week I am fuelled with a renewed enthusiasm for teaching. I can`t wait to eventually get home and do my PGCE and start teaching properly; not just playing with overly spoiled children. The pretentious quote is from Henry Adams who is quoted in Tuesdays with Morrie, which I`m currently reading and is partly prompting the pro-teaching sentiment. If you haven`t read it, it`s about a guy who discovers his old college professor is dying and so rekindles their old friendship. It`s reminded me of Mr O`Connell who I was never so close to, but would have liked to have been. If anyone from Haverhill sees him, do send him my regards (and a copy of the book, from me). On Yesterday, it made me cry just before one of my classes and I had to pretend to be suffering from hayfever to avert any awkward questions (I might be, my eyes are still red, 24 hours later).

That said, my teaching this week, has been below par again. I have lost control of one of my classes - only three girls, which shouldn`t be a challenge, but one is a complete princess and ridicules me in Japanese, knowing I don`t understand. I have made her cry in the past and can feel it coming on again. I also made Rei cry (he is wearing the green and yellow scarf and sticking his fingers up behind Haru`s head in the last entry).

He was, until last week, my biggest fan, but gets very excited and aggressive if we play too many games. Having given them tests and bad lessons lately, I decided I would make an effort to be more genki, but this made Rei go crazy and by the end of the lesson he was almost frothing at the mouth. He shoved Gakuto out of the way to get to the front of the queue to leave and I made him go and sit back down and wait. His fury broke into tears and as he left the school he gave me the strongest look of hate I`ve ever seen on a human being. Some of my kids have the potential to be killers.

My strangest student is having a renaissance at the moment. He has gone from strange to philosophical and interesting. The conversations about murders are over, now we are discussing religion and Marxism. Last night, I even managed to squeeze `religion is the opiate of the people` into our lesson. It`s not like teaching at all, particularly as he ignores me whenever I try to correct his English, but very enthusiastically notes down any diagrams of flora or fauna I put on the board.

My Japanese is barely coming on. My teacher on Tuesdays is utterly useless. This week, we were observed by a new volunteer who told me to ignore him, he would only observe, then spent my entire lesson discussing teaching techniques, in speedy Japanese, with Noguchi-san. When he realised I was bored and found this rude, he laughed and told me it was good listening practise. I am tempted to complain, but Noguchi-san puts so much effort into preparing his materials for me, that I feel hugely ungrateful. It would be far more useful if he didn`t do these and also didn`t explain basic structures I have already grasped in stuttering English, but it is ￥2000 for a year, so I am in no position to moan.

Last night, I met up with Kaori, a sophisticated, serious and mental girl I met at Cafe Lamp. She`s lovely, but crazily in love with an awful Canadian JET, who`s in a shit band and likes Sum 41. He and his friends wear over-sized trousers and make themselves look as ridiculous as possible while hanging out at S&M parties. It`s all very youthful. He spends a lot of time together and she reads enormous sentiment into his every action. He is very young and just seems to be exploiting the undoubtedly novel attention he is getting. He`s leading Kaori on, but because of the language difference, this was very difficult to warn her about. I had to teach her `flirt` and `have sex` (instead of `have sexed`, although I might use that myself) last night in the course of our conversation. I didn`t want to bombard her with new language. We had fun though. She brought me to the internet cafe for some stalking practise. The Graeme, her target, made her a birthday gift of old band merchandise he had laying around the flat, which she was overjoyed with, but she can`t make out the lyrics so we found his website and downloaded a song. I had to sit and transcribe. It was great, three of my favourite hobbies combined: music, writing and stalking.

After that, we went to a new izakaya for some sashimi and sours (alcopops, but somehow far more grown-up and acceptable). Kaori was dissapointed at my resolution to stay away from the George, she is hoping to go and be introduced. I am sure it won`t be long.