Sometimes I just don't know what to do with a class, because the chapter has no good information, or my creativity just runs out. The students are getting more comfortable with me, which is good for teaching, but bad when their comfortable enough to start misbehaving and testing my limits. So far, the best method seems to be offering them a fun activity at the end of the lesson if there is some less fun stuff at the beginning. Even if it's not a great activity, the students will be interested for about 7 minutes in anything. The trick is constantly changing activities while somehow connecting all of them to the vocabulary, grammar and skill that I am trying to emphasize. That I have not mastered.
Organization is key, getting a lesson to flow, where each activity builds off of the last. But a well organized lesson almost always buts against the poorly organized books I am dealing with, that jump around everywhere, doing nothing to build student confidence or giving lessons for lessons with flow.
My landlady has adopted me as her son, even using diminutives (my little son, my little rabbit, etc.) This is good because she can tell me information about everything, most usefully where and how to buy anything. The only bad thing is that she now gives me a lot of food, and refuses any payment. The only thing I have to give is money, since I don't harvest a crop this summer and fall.
Other people have also given me food, and it seems fairly common to trade and exchange food, because everybody still has land. It's illegal to sell this land (though there is a black market) and it is a direct hold over from serfdom? There is a specific word for this system, but I forgot. Some argue that it keeps the whole country poor, because it is inherently inefficient to have one family working their acre of land for food by hand rather than privatizing and having a full time farmer work the land with tractors, crop rotations, fertilizer, and stuff.
Others argue that if you take away the land, if people have no work, and many don't, they will die on the street if they don't have their basements full of potatoes.
Then again maybe if they were hungry, protesters would be numerous enough to actually get their government to do something productive, rather than making rich people richer. Maybe that's why the government keeps them well fed…
