A faint glimmer of light

At the end of this terrible week, and this supremely awful day, there was a faint glimmer of light. I am helping some of the third year students prepare for an English speech competition, and from now until mid or late October I will be staying after school to help them study. They have to write a speech and then recite it from memory at the competition. The first girl I helped today was really quiet, and her pronunciation was pretty weak, I had to work a lot with her on the "th" and "w" sounds, and especially the l/r difference. I've never really taught phonics before, and it's hard when those sounds don't exist in Japanese. I was a little discouraged. 

Then the second student came in. I'll call him TM (even on a personal blog, I need to be careful about the students' privacy). I worked with him a bit yesterday, we went over the first paragraph of his speech, and practiced reading it a few times, and I pointed out a few errors and pronunciation issues. After the first girl, I wasn't expecting much. But when I asked him if he could do any of it from memory yet (mind you, he JUST got the final copy of the English translation yesterday), he covered up the paper and recited the entire first paragraph perfectly. I was literally almost in tears, I was so happy. After such a bad week, and such a terrible class today with the second years, and feeling like the students are all slackers, I was so happy to see how well he did, and how hard he must have studied last night. He's such a sweet kid too, he's got such a sweet smile. He really made my day a whole lot better.