Japan part 2

09/03/2008

School has started so now there is finally something new to do!

There is no class on the first and last days of a semester here; instead there is an all-school assembly in the gym. There is no central heat or air conditioning in the gym (or in the rest of the building either for that matter) so as you can imagine it was hot in there on Monday. In fact, there are 750 students and about 50 other staff members so when I say "hot" I'm really talking about sauna-like heat and humidity. Two people passed out from the heat (luckily I was not one of them) and I gave a speech introducing myself to the school (it was just a few short sentences in English about how happy I am to be here and so on) and it went pretty well!

Then yesterday was the first day of actual classes - my schedule this semester is really pretty easy; I have 3 classes on Monday, 4 Tuesday, 2 Wednesday, 1 Thursday and 3 Friday. So yesterday I taught 4 classes but my lesson plan was the same for all of them (a self-introduction on my part followed by a worksheet on "summer vacation" for the students) so it was easy and it went smoothly. All of my students so far are really sweet (and funny) so I'd say things got off to a good start yesterday.

As for the actual teaching situation: the motto of the JET Programme is basically "every situation is different"; meaning that some JETs don't do much or any teaching at all and are simply used as "tape recorders" to say vocab words in English - and other JETs may to most if not all of the lesson planning and teaching! The only similarity in JETs jobs is that there will always be a certified "Japanese Teacher of English" (JTE) in the room. My school is one of the more JET-friendly ones (luckily)!

Ian and I are working on getting internet at our apartment, so hopefully that will happen sometime this month! It is not unusual in Japan for seemingly simple things (like getting internet) to take a horribly long time. What can be accomplished with one phone call in the states tends to take several phone calls and lots of paperwork here.