Today's morning class

How surprised I was when starting my class this morning. All students stood up and greeted me in a big unified voice. Usually this class breaks out in one big chatting club, like a popular bar on Saturday night. Today i asked them only twice and they all opened their text books and quickly found the correct page. (the ones who brought their textbooks that is...) Naturally some couldn't resist talking quietly with nearby classmates but the atmosphere was far better than it had been up to now. we swiftly went through the pages and we moved on to some speaking exercises. Before the students had been somewhat reluctant to speak English in a loud voice, (this is strange because they never hold back when chatting with their friends in Japanese) but today most students just did as I requested from them.
During the second part of the lesson we did some listening exercises as a warming up for the up coming mid-term tests. They didn't do very well on the test but they listened to my explanations of the questions and took notes. For a Friday morning this was an exceptionally fine class and it didn't make me tired at all!! I am anxious to teach them again next week and see if they were for real or just pretending to be good students...