Saturday, November 26, 2011

Teaching and chillin, relaxing like a villian


I guess I will only be updating this blog sporadically.  With such a small readership, I am sure no one will blame me.  I have been incredibly lazy however.  I won’t even try and claim that I have been busy.  I really haven’t.  I am just lazy about it, and would rather just play my PC games. 
 

While yeah, I am in Japan, and yeah, it’s cool, I am also pretty broke, and even when it looks like I am going to be saving some money… boom! Something happens to eat all the cash up.  Case in point, our refridgerator is leaking.  So we have to buy a new one.  Granted the old one was a hand me down from the early 90s… It was free.  So that is a bummer.  At least we will get a lot of points on our Yodobashi Camera card.  I would love to go out and do some touristy things, but now is not the time really.  Thank god I like games, and 50$ can hold me off for a month.  Just going to Tokyo for a day would cost twice that I think.  From my last post, I was playing Shogun 2 (Which I still am.. ) Mass effect 2 and WItcher 2… All of them were great games.  Now I am downloading Space Marine, LA noir and Dragonage:Origins… let’s see how this goes.  


As far as work goes, I am teaching at 4 different middles schools, peppered by an occasional Elementary school.  Middle school A, the biggest of the lot, is my least favorite.  That doesn’t mean I don’t like it, but I go so infrequently, I have no relationship with the students or other teachers.  I feel bad about this school too, because I really don’t do a lot there.  They always schedule me with so much free time, and I get the feeling that the principle isn’t too keen on me either, and if it were his choice, I wouldn’t be there.  The English teachers are all really cool though, and I have only taught the 3rd year students.  I have no idea about the other grades.  They are the only school that has invited me to 2 different functions; I have unfortunately not been able to make them, so maybe they think the feeling is mutual. 

School B is one I have to take a bus for, and the kids at that school are the roughest lot of all the schools.  Most aren’t very motivated, and there is quite a lot of acting out by the students.  The poor teachers are always trying to keep things under control more than they teach.  They are all really nice people there, and it seems that I am at that school the most, so I have a bit of a relation with the kids.  Being a foreigner and the fact that they know I used to work for the Department of Juvenile Justice, makes most of them back off immediately, but I still get tested… and they still lose when they do.  I am not enforcing any rules and I am not getting on their case, but they hardly scare me… and most of them see that when they try to do that, they actually encourage me.  Like all schools, that is a minority though.
School C is a smaller school which I could technically walk to, but if I take the bus, its paid for and I get to ride with a bunch of cute nurses who get off at the University hospital down the street… *sigh*….  This school is smaller, but has a good concentration of really motivated kids and teachers.  The teachers there are very accepting of me, and are generally relieved I speak a smattering of Japanese.
School D is my favorite, and is the smallest.  Small schools have always been my favorite, since I can better develop relationships.  The teachers there have an amazing corp de esprit, and the students are a riot.  The only bad part is the girls are openly, and uncomfortably flirtatious…  My job is to be as friendly as possible, develop a working relationship with the students, and basically be an entertainer.  This complicates things a little, but it’s a minor and innocent thing, I’m sure.  I have a lot of fun with everyone there, but unfortunately I go there very rarely.
To finish this off, let me talk about teachers in Japan.  Teacher is not the correct word for them, and is only vaguely similar to what we refer to as a teacher in western society.  I would rather call them social custodians.  They are never off duty, and I mean that in the most literal of senses.  When they are not actually teaching a course, they are coaching or leading some other club… That includes the weekends too.  If one of their students does something stupid outside of school, then the ‘teachers’ are involved sometimes before anyone else.  They are a second set of parents, working for peanuts.  A western teacher would find this untenable, and unions would certainly go berserk.  But they all knew what they were getting into before they joined, and the ones that survive are made of really tough stuff.  You see that while US teachers do less (I am not saying they do little, I am just saying they are only in charge of the lessons), they receive better preparation and much better support.  Teachers here figuratively sink or swim, with only a few weeks of on the job training. 
So here’s to you! Japanese teachers that survive! And to those ALTs who dare call themselves teacher… yeah… you’re really not.

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