First Month

I'm in the middle of my fourth week teaching now, and it's had its ups and downs.

I have two schools, a Junior High and an Elementary school. I teach first, second, third years, and two special needs classes at JHS and fifth and sixth grade at ES. Next month I will teach Kindergarten for the first time which should be fun.

My introduction classes seemed to go down pretty well in every class. I found that I went through it a bit too fast and had too much time at the end of class, so I definitely need to work on my timing. The kids are all really funny and sweet, and when I'm out and about I hear tiny voices shout 'Aiona-sensei! Hello!' I guess that's what happens when you live really close to school in a smaller city.

Unfortunately after just one introduction class and one regular class, my Elementary school complained about me to Interac. They said I wasn't preparing well enough. I was really disappointed. They didn't even give me one month to get used to life in Japan, get used to a job I have basically no experience for.

My trainer came to the school, and it turned out the previous ALT was really good and had a lot of experience and the teachers were comparing me to her. Unfortunately for the school, I'm not just a malfunctioning robot that Interac can just come and fix, so they're going to have to give me some time to improve. I did get a lot of awesome advice from the trainer and I know what I have to improve. I need to have better voice projection, I need to explain instructions to the kids better, and generally just have more confidence. As much as I learned from him coming to school and helping me teach some classes and plan lessons, it really stung that I wasn't given a chance. And I feel kind of awkward around the teachers knowing that they are disappointed in my performance.

On the other hand, the Junior High school are pretty good. There's a lot less for the ALT to do at JHS. In elementary, you're pretty much expected to handle the whole class and the teacher just sits and watches. At JHS, in my experience so far, the teacher does the lesson and they just get the ALT to read out the English vocab and passages. I'm basically a human tape recorder. The only exception to this is my special needs classes, where I have just been thinking up fun games and activities for the kids, and the teacher mostly deals with discipline. The staff at my JHS talk to me a lot more than my ES, and I feel a lot more like I'm part of the school. Some of the teachers even invited me to dinner.

As for outside of school, I really haven't been doing much. I've been so tired from having this new kinda stressful job that at weekends I pretty much just sleep and watch TV. There isn't all that much to do here, but I did discover a cool bookstore/second hand game/DVD/CD store that's a 15 minute walk from my flat and is open till midnight every day. It's really nothing like the Japan I'm used to. When I lived in Tokyo, I could just jump on a train and go to any kind of shop or bar or restaurant, I went to music performances and saw stuff like Kabuki. And it was way easier to meet people. Apart from teachers I haven't met anyone Japanese here. Unless you count the pizza delivery guy who seems to recognise me now! I haven't decided yet if I want to go live in a big Japanese city once I've been here a year. I do miss Tokyo.

Well it's not even been a month since I moved to this city so we will have to see what happens!