The Month-Long Cold

I'm admittedly new to this whole being-a-teacher thing. Before I started teaching them, I was sure I hated children. They were noisy, annoying, smelly, and essentially walking germ factories.

Then I started teaching them, and I realized that working with small children is one of the most rewarding and fun jobs I've ever had in my life. I realized that little kids and the way they see the world are awesome. However, I also realized I was right about the other stuff too. Especially the germ thing.

STEEL YOURSELVES

I've been told that a good number of people at my work, when they started, had a cold that lasted for close to a month. Originally, I figured I'd dodged a bullet since I hadn't been particularly sick for a good half-year after I started. But now that the weather is changing (or rather, has changed) I've come down with a cold that just refuses to go away.

I guess you have to build up a bunch of specific antibodies for the special sorts of viruses and bacteria four-year-olds manage to collect on a daily basis. And admittedly I have never had a job where the people at work will walk up and bite me on the arm or cough and sneeze directly into my unprepared face.

I guess on the plus side, after I'm finished teaching, my immune system is going to truly be that: immune. I can't think of another job I could possibly have where I'd be subject to the sheer quantity of disease I face on a daily basis here.

They are cute, though. At least being sick means I can't smell 'em.

The job search and its aftermath

The Job Search

就職物語

The Obu Job

While I was at Yamasa, for the last two semesters I was there, I had a small once-a-week job in Obu teaching kindergarteners. I got the job from a friend of mine who was leaving the country and needed to get rid of his classes. That's generally how things work in the gaijin community here--the revolving-door nature of living in Japan temporarily really makes it easy to get part time work as people leave and hand you a job here or there.

I was more of an assistant in that job than an actual teacher, and the pay wasn't amazing (though it was certainly enough to cover food expenses, which was nice) but it taught me that I actually really enjoy dealing with small children.

Every class would be structured the same way: we'd begin with flashcard review, where the kids had to produce words for the colors, numbers, shapes, weather, and basic greetings ("my name is Ryota, I'm 8 years old" etc) among other things. Once we had finished the review, we generally went into TPR (Total Physical Response, a thing I had never heard of before), where I would yell out actions and the kids would do the actions. This would include stuff like "Okay everyone, touch something green!" or "Everyone walk slowly! Walk quickly! RUN! STOP!". Stuff like that. I guess it helps kindergarteners let out some of that energy they always seem to have, and it was actually a lot of fun.

Then after that was usually music time, where they'd sing songs with dances or hand motions to go along with them. Most of the songs I knew, like The Itsy Bitsy Spider and The Hokey Pokey and the ones I didn't I figured out pretty easily. Cool stuff. After they were all songed out, we would get out our workbooks and do a page which usually involved coloring or folding something.

It was a great job and I actually really grew to love those kids. But since my tenure at Yamasa was coming to an end, I had to find a full-time job.

The Search

All my friends knew that it was my last semester and that I wasn't ready to leave the country yet, so pretty much everyone had a recommendation as to where I could go to work. I had friends working full- or part-time at basically every national eikaiwa (English conversation school) chain in the area: ECC, Berlitz, AEON, and others. However, as fate would have it, one of my Taiwanese friends had a friend who was applying to be an assistant at a local school for super little kids (preschool age), and through the grapevine had heard that I was looking for a job. Turns out that eikaiwa like that one are generally always hiring for summer, since kids are out of school and the ones whose parents hate them force them to go to English school every day during vacation.

My "interview" ended up being me teaching a full day of Saturday class (five hours) full of problem students by myself because their previous teacher had quit recently. It was one of the most bewildering and horrifying experiences of my life, seeing as how I had very little experience teaching at that point, extremely little experience teaching children without anyone around to help me, and exactly zero experience teaching elementary students.

At the end of the day I was offered the job (presumably because they were desperate) and at that point due to my utter laziness it had reached the point where, due to visa processing times, it was either take this job or go back to the States and do something else. I chose the former, obviously, and here I am. But I was real worried at the beginning about my viability as a teacher.

The New Job Begins

新しい仕事が始まる

So, basically, I began working there before I was even finished at Yamasa. I taught only on Saturdays, and then came in on Thursdays and Fridays to observe some afternoon classes. This was referred to as "training."

The way this particular school works (and I'm not going to write the name of the school I work for because lol internet) on weekdays is in two parts. The first part goes from 10:00AM to 2:45PM, and is a full-day preschool class. There are three different levels of classes: the baby class for 1-3 year olds, then there are two pre-K classes containing kids from 4-6 years old. Those two classes are split along ability lines, but they generally end up being split along age lines as well, since most of these kids have been coming to this school their entire lives.

Then, in the afternoon, starting at 3:55, kids come in for small 45-minute group lessons. They can be as young as kindergarten and as old as high school, though the high schoolers generally end up coming real super late because of all the other stuff those poor kids are forced to do.

These days, I am fairly happy about where I am. My only real gripe is about the deterioration of my Japanese language ability, because I work in a school with nothing but Americans (or English-speaking Philipinos or Japanese staff who speak some manner of English). I sometimes go multiple days without speaking a single bit of Japanese. But that's a story for another day.


As an aside, I know I'm really living up to the title of my blog. I'm really trying to make an effort to update more often, but my schedule gets in the way a lot. I apologize.

Away From Keyboard

Living up to the name of my blog, I've been neglecting updating for close to 10 months at this point. I'd like to blame it on how hard classes had been (they were hard) or how stressful finding a job was (it was pretty stressful) but honestly I'm just a lazy bastard. In my defense, though, I have adopted a psychological bug that makes me feel like I'm wasting tons of time if I'm not spending my time interacting with something in Japanese. Unfortunately, that has the unwanted side-effect of making it easy to convince myself to spend all of my off-time interacting with Japanese television shows sitting on my butt instead of doing anything interesting.

Also, in my absence from updates, Blogger seems to have lost a lot of my pictures from earlier posts. I'll see if I can't fix it a bit later.

So, let's see. Here are some things I can recap.

1. End of Yamasa and the JLPT
2. The job search and subsequent job
3. Study plan, future plans

I may split that up over a few posts. Let's see.

End of Yamasa and the JLPT

ヤマサでの最後の学期と日本語能力試験

I ended up finishing out my year at Yamasa, finishing (successfully) 201 and 202, stopping short before their 300-level pre-advanced course. Through the end of 202, we finished what we called the blue book, which I feel was a big bunch of really good information. I'm actually a huge fan of that book. In fact, I'm a pretty big fan of all the books we used at Yamasa. After the end of the semester, I bought the 300-level book (the red book) even though I wasn't going to take 300--the idea was that I was going to study the whole book by myself for a year and see where I was after that.

My views on Japanese study, and maybe language study in general, have been rapidly evolving in every direction over the past year, so it's difficult to articulate where I stand on the subject. The red book, while still as excellent as the blue book, contains lots and lots of language that you don't really see on a regular basis. Lots of grammar constructions that you'll only find in books, lots of vocabulary that you'll only hear in formal press conferences, and so on. This sort of language is incredibly useful and necessary if you ever want to consider yourself fluent in any language, but at the same time...

I don't know, I feel like maybe the longest period of time anyone should ever take language classes is a full year. At this point I feel like my reading ability and kanji knowledge is so far ahead of my actually conversational fluency in the language that it's actually starting to become a hindrance. Any time I want to talk to someone in Japanese my brain tries to construct these elaborate literary sentences that just don't hold up in the real world. They're cumbersome to say and make you sound like a pompous jerk.

Meanwhile, I've met people who are more fluent than I am in Japanese who learned it from talking to people in bars, having Japanese girlfriends, or other random things. To be fair, they've been here tons more time than I have, and most people who learn like that end up being functionally illiterate in the language, but I can't help but be a little jealous. The classroom setting is fantastic for putting grammar points into your head but I guess the thing I've realized is that no classroom in the world is going to get you the everyday conversational practice that you're going to need.

I feel something similar about the N2. I took it last time around and ended up failing it by a few points in every category. I bet I could pass it now after another semester and a bunch of self-study, and yeah, maybe it's useful enough on a CV to have. But I don't really put any stock in it at all, and that's not because I failed it. It seems like the JLPT measures how well you know the language academically, but  you can pass N2 without being able to hold a conversation with actual people, so I don't think I'm gonna judge myself by it.

So am I going to return to Yamasa? I was sure I was going to when I was giving my graduation speech. Now? I don't know. I feel like maybe I've reached a point in the language where the most effective thing to do would be to just actively consume as much Japanese as humanly possible. For the time being, though, I have at least another year to go in this country so we'll see.

I'll update in a few days with more information about my current job and future plans and whatnot.