Today started with ramen. Actually today started with Albert knocking on my door asking if I was ready to go to breakfast at Denny's (yes, of the big slam variety). Considering that I answered the door wearing my work shirt (green polka dots) and my pajama pants (blue plaid), I said no, I wasn't ready. My super clashing outfit also said no. I had mostly forgotten that we had planned to all go to Denny's in the morning before training. My sleeping in, which was a small feat in itself considering jet lag, might have also been subconscious sabotage. I don't even like Denny's in America. I wasn't sure if I was really prepared to deal with being served salad on the same plate as my ridiculously overpriced stack of pancakes. Also, it gets a little tiring spending all of your day with the same two people. Hannah and Albert are nice enough, but I am getting rather burned out on them. I was kind of glad that I had overslept so I could have some time in the house by myself, or listening to rap songs in the kitchen with Wade, who i like a lot better than the others in the house. But yes, ramen instead. It had a flat rectangular thing on top that resembled a sponge. It also tasted like a sponge. A tasty sweet freeze-dried tofu sponge.
Then it was off to more training. The room we were in had pictures hanging on the wall of the Mona Lisa and Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl earring that had been colored by students as an activity. Most of them were illustrated like japanimation characters.
The second half of training was in Chiba. We sat in a starbucks for a while drinking weak coffee and staring out the window at people passing on the sidewalk. There was a kid with a 1950's greaser haircut. I ate a curry tomato pastry. Girls with legs as thick as my arm walked by. I sipped more weak coffee. Albert, Hannah, and i still had an hour to kill so we decided to wander around. We came across a huge building with a big beehive looking thing suspended within the glass structure. Turns out it was a planetarium. At training we learned to hide our important stuff in the freezer, not to run around screaming in our boxer shorts during an earthquake, and how to wrestle cockroaches. At the very end we learned the important stuff- the stuff about the next year of our lives.
I move out of the guest house on Monday. I stay with another teacher in her apartment for a week before I can move into my actual apartment. I also learned what classes I will teach, at what schools, and when. I only teach at 2 schools (+ a daycare) which is rare for this kind of gig. Usually teachers are all over the place. I teach mostly young kids and adults. There are a few high school and Junior high school thrown in too. Nine of my twenty five classes in the week are kids pre-school (age 4) to grade 6. Eleven are adult classes, many of which are private one- on- one lessons. The wild card is a pair of "classes" at a day care. While all other classes in my regular schools are capped at 6 students (3 students is the average), the day care will have 18 to 25 little kids for me to attempt to teach. Aside from the obvious difficulties of trying to manage 25 rambunctious toddlers in a foreign language, the ages of the kids can have a wide range. Teaching English to a two-year old who cannot even speak japanese yet requires a very different approach than teaching english to a six-year old. In the day care all those ages are mixed together.
The adult classes and the day care have me the most nervous. For the adults, the egos are fragile and the language skills have pretty much plateaued. Bad habits are already ingrained, and correction seems like a delicate matter.
Despite these anxieties, teaching seems much easier than it did when I was in Portland. Wade who is observing, and the other teachers say it doesn't even feel like a job. You just play with kids all day and get paid. In my case I will be playing with kids all day and asking housewives and business men where they went shopping on sunday while getting paid for it.
Hannah reminds me so much of Shannon. Sometimes I am convinced they are the same person. They look exactly the same. Both tall. Both pale and strawberry blond with the same exact bone structure in their face. To make matters worse their voices sound the same and they have the same manner of making conversation. This girl Hannah gets unreasonably excited about cartoons and video games too. I swear if Shannon was smaller and from Hillsboro, i would be living right now with her in Japan. I have been trying to sneak a picture of this phenomenon, but I don't want to be weird or creepy.
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