The Job Begins...

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Last Wednesday marked the first day of school at both of the senior high schools where I teach.

That means I actually had to become a teacher.

On the first day, which included a speech in Japanese (yikes!) and two lessons, I was pretty nervous - butterflies and everything. I felt a little like I was just pretending to be a teacher, especially when I had to walk around the room as the students filled out their worksheets. Plus, every classroom has its own dynamic - though the almost all male classes at my technical high school seem to be uniformly genki - and every teacher I work with has his or her own teaching style. I work with 8 Japanese Teachers of English, or JTEs, in total. In one class I may get a rowdy group who somehow knows English phrases that need not be repeated here, and the next class may be completely silent, staring at me like I just asked them to calculate the square root of pi in their heads.

This is a lot for a first time, untrained, non-fluent-in-Japanese foreigner to get used to. So before every class last week I got the same butterflies, wondering if the students would like me and whether the JTEs would think I did a good job. This week, as I begin working with the same teachers for the second time, I thankfully feel more comfortable.

My favorite part of the work day, though, comes after school when the students have their club activities. I am part of the English club (of course) and my school's Awa Odori dance group. Once the kids have stepped out of their group-mentality-classroom role and I've stepped out of my unsure-first-time-teacher role, it's much easier to get to know them. And I think it's fun for them to have a chance to teach me something. As an added benefit, it's much easier to laugh when a teenage boy tells me he "wants" me when I'm not in charge of a classroom/trying to successfully teach a lesson.

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Comments

[nancy peavy]

fabulous
I can tell from the blog that you are already a rock star- this will continue and we love reading your observations and all your activities. Nancy and bob