Training

I have just started to relax a little after a pretty stressful week of training. I arrived on Sunday the 22nd, and straight away on the following Monday I went to my first day of training. I'm going to quickly go through what training involves:

Most of that first day was paperwork. We got big folders of documents to go through and confirm that we had received everything, from manuals on teaching and safety, to insurance documents and schedules. I don't think I was the only person who was totally confused!

I will be working under a Gyomu Itaku style contract which means that the teachers cannot instruct me on what to do, I only take orders from Interac. It seems pretty confusing but hopefully it will make more sense with time.

In the afternoon all 20 of us at training filed in and out of a health clinic to get chest x-rays which is pretty standard. I was totally wiped out after this first day and I fell asleep at 5pm.

Tuesday was when we learned about elementary school. It was pretty fun. We went through each section of a standard lesson and were picked 'at random' to perfom each part in front of each other. I was told I needed to work on my voice projection and genkiness. My luggage arrived on this day.

Wednesday was junior high school, and I was congratulated on improving my voice projection! We were learning so much so fast that I started to get really stressed. I wish that training had been two weeks instead of just one. I hung out with some coworkers and we went to karaoke.

Thursday was high school, and I don't have any high schools, so I went to the immigration centre with someone going to the same city as me because we needed to change our visas so we can teach kindergarten. Nothing too hard, just had to sit in a hot crowded room and wait for a number to flash up. Then I had to prepare for the test of the week: we all had to perform 15 minute demo lessons in front of each other.

So Friday was pretty much just those demo lessons. I was nearly last and everyone was really stressed and tired. My lesson was an elementary grade 3 'I like ~' class. I had flash cards of animals, and at one point I had to get everyone into groups, and they took turns making impressions of animals that the others had to guess. At this point everyone just got really hyper and I lost control of them! A class of 20 adults, and they just got crazy! It was kind of sweet. It relaxed the people who had to perform after me at least. On Friday we also had to do drug tests and had a wee presentation about not doing drugs or drink driving.

So yeah I was pretty stressed all week. But the trainers, and my colleagues are all really nice and I feel pretty lucky. I've heard horror stories about Interac branch offices and about the trainers but I definitely like mine. It was grueling having training about a job I'm totally unqualified for, 8 hours a day for 5 days. It reminded me that I'm getting myself into something I'm really unprepared for. But I'm sure it will be okay.