やりたくない

Have you ever been in a situation where there's something that you're obliged to go for, but you don't want to? No, please don't try to hide it, everyone has had this sort of thing (*koff* school *koff*) before somewhere in their lives.

See, I had one of those today. Now just in case you don't know, I have to 'teach' English to a couple of 5-year old kids. And I didn't really feel like going to do it today. It's not that I don't like kids. Or even that I don't like these two kids in particular. I actually do rather enjoy spending time with kids, and these two are no exception.

Evidence that I do enjoy being with kids, though these kids aren't the two that I teach English to.

However, teaching them English has not exactly been the easiest of endeavours on my part. See, I'm not using any text or syllabus to teach them, which gives me a great deal of freedom in teaching. Unfortunately (for me), it also means that I have no materiel to simply copy and use to teach them, so I have to come up with lesson plans and ideas to help me teach them.

(Sidenote: To my friends at NIE and who are currently working for MOE, yes, I know my complaints sound superficial to you guys, since you have to do this all the time and have to teach all the time, but please, I'm not trained like you guys, so give me a break and let me rant a little. Thanks.)

And as any of you who remotely knows me will know, advanced planning (both in terms of complexity and foresight) is not my strongest suite. So when I realized that it was time for English lessons a couple of days ago, I still hadn't prepared anything of 'sufficient value' in my own opinion, and I wasn't really looking forward to going to teach the kids today.

Now at about the same time, I started to get a bit of a cold and a bit of a sore throat. And I thought, "Maybe I should just cancel the lesson, since I am sick and I wouldn't want the kids to catch my flu bug," which sounds oh so noble and all, except it wasn't that I wanted to keep them safe, I was really just looking for a cop out excuse. And of course, by this morning, I was almost completely fine.

And so I left home and went over to Kotesashi, thinking that you know, I didn't really have enough stuff to teach them and all that. I did have a sort of lesson plan on what to teach, but I didn't have much confidence in it. And so of course, in such times of extreme distress and desperation (I'm being overly dramatic here, in case it doesn't come through the html script), I said a short prayer to God for today's lesson (I'm not being overly dramatic here. I really did pray, and I really did mean it). Because, as we all know, God will take all our big worries, and all our small worries, and all our worries that we don't even realize we're worrying about.

And you know what, today went really well. Not too sure how much the kids learned, but they seemed to be having fun, and we all ended up drawing pictures on my small 15x10 cm whiteboard.

And I am glad that I went today. I'm glad that I didn't try to find a weak excuse to not go, and fake my way out of it. But most of all, I'm glad that I have a God who is willing to help me with even the little things in my life that I did not prepare though I should have, if only I'm willing to give it to Him.

P.S. I am in no way condoning or promoting procrastination. If you have work to do, you should like go and get it done now.