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| Me playing for Aogumi on sports day. This is with the 1st year kids at Ichihara-chu. They were fantastic kids! |
Being at NOVA was not all that bad. There were people who had a far worse time of it, but in my experience, many of those same people had 'entitlement issues'. They often seemed like they wanted Japan to conform to them as opposed to them conforming to Japan... Sorry, there is no middle ground on the issue, but for those who have spent more than a couple of years there, it starts to become a big issue that a balance has to be struck on. Its also true that working at a country school for NOVA was the best way to go. Big city schools had every kind of manager wanting to stick their fingers in a the pie, and pissing off everyone else in the process. In the country, everyone was a lot more relaxed and had fun compared to their city counterparts. Truly though, it was the Japanese staff that got screwed over the most when it came to work demands. As for me, I saw a lot of the crookedness NOVA was up to, and I wont lie... Being someone that had taken on a lot of extra responsibilities, I had a sense of entitlement myself. I honestly think what did it was I used to get very steady yearly raises because of my performance except for my last year there. Their reason was because I had too many sick days. That was true, I got really sick and missed almost 2 weeks straight. I have never been as sick in my life in fact... The first time you get the flu overseas is a real trial simply because your body has no defense against that particular strain of influenza... I shit you not there were a couple times that I thought I was about to die. I actually should have gone to the hospital for that, but I am far too stubborn I guess. I thought I was getting punished enough with 2 weeks of no salary... We had no sick days, and they would not allow me to use my paid leave for some odd reason... But 10 days of unscheduled leave was too much to considered for a raise. I lobbied against that train of thought and I actually made them a graph of how, overall I was still becoming more and more skilled at my job... They still didn't bite and that pissed me off, so I quit. No... I didn't rage quit, I looked for another position, quit, went home for Christmas, then started a new job with Interac.
Interac was pretty cool as far as how the management dealt with you in comparison to NOVA. I was almost given free reign to do whatever. I pretty much worked by myself, going from Junior High and Elementary schools in Kimitsu. Their Board of Education had me working at schools for a couple of months before going to a new school, which kind of sucked since I never really got a chance to connect with any of the kids. My salary with Interac was almost 50,000 yen less a month than NOVA however... Thats a whole month worth of rent, so I started looking for a new place. I found a tiny little apartment in downtown Chiba (a video of that place is in an earlier post). When I moved there, they shifted my working area to Ichihara, and I would work at a Junior Highschool for 6 months before cycling to another. I would also go to an Elementary school once every two weeks, and usually the same one. Once a month, all the foreign teachers would meet for a few hours. It was an odd grouping of people which consisted of this one guy from NY who was a fluent Japanese speaker. He was a really great guy and I always enjoyed talking with him. There was another entitled guy from Alabama who thought the whole country was dumb, but enjoyed the beer in Japan. He was a pretty brazen outspoken guy, who I was pretty indifferent to. There was also this really quiet little Asian girl who wouldn't speak. I felt really bad for her because we had a pretty intense little group. I tried to be social with her when I could, but she would usually recoil from me pretty quickly. Later by coincidence, I found a blog she had written and she verbally tore me a new one there. I guess no deed goes unpunished... I will post something more about that later, but for now I have written enough
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