TA Again in Tokyo university
One of my most pleasurable experiences back in Unicamp were my TA activities. Many of my current friends were made while I helped them to trudge through reams of C source code. Yesterday I finally had my first experience as a TA here in Japan.
Well, actually that was a little underwhelming. I’m being a TA for a course about simulation, where the students are supposed to build automatic teams for a simulated soccer game. A large part of the score for the course will be given from a internal tournament between the students’ projects. It had everything to be a very interesting course.
The problem really is that I was supposed to make a presentation about the programming method yesterday, and I wasn’t aware of it, so I had to improvise. Since I know the simulator, that usually wouldn’t be a problem - I have already improvised many a talk I had forgotten to prepare.
- Except that I suck at improvising in japanese -
- And I double suck at monologues in japanese -
There is no excuse, really. After two years here I should be able to handle a 15 minutes exposition about a simulation environment. But the truth is that I have severely been slacking in my studies. I think it has been almost an year since I last sat to seriously study japanese. Marilia has proposed that we take the 1kyu next year, so I hope that will make me study japanese again.
Well, on the other hand, once the exposition was over, I was able to talk directly to the students, and now protected by my ability in kaiwa (dialogue), I was able to take on their more practical questions.
Or at least those of the only student team that seemed to be interested in the project.