Sunday, September 10, 2006

The first working week

Wow, that was my thought of my first day of working for elementary kids in Japan. I had a lot of fun, even though I was just soooo tired at the end of every working day. I will tell you what happened the last week.

This week I went to 5 elementary schools, 2 in Kobe, and 3 in North Kobe *Kita-Ku*. I had 4-6 lessons a day, from 3rd grade up to the 6th grade. The lessons where only 45 minutes, and I did a lot of small games to practice the target languages ( what is it? It's an apple. What month is it? It is January).

It is funny to see how children look up to you, and sometimes even look down a bit. When I walk in the hallway, I hear things like: aaa ego no sensei *English teacher*, even 2 times David Beckham,and they greet me with a big smile. But sometimes, in the class, I hear Baka or Aho *stupid* because I try to be funny but of course not everyone thinks that I am actually really funny. But I am getting 250.000yen a month to teach some kids English, and to act stupid sometimes... so I don't care about hearing names like that haha.

I needed to make a lot of preparations for the lesson plans last weeks, from making lesson plans up to thinking about games. But I have for example lesson 1-5, 20 times in 1 month, and lesson 1-6 10 times a month, so this week I don't even have to make any preparation anymore :D.

I work from 8.45 up to 3.45 *on Wednesday it is even shorter 1.45/2.45* I have all public holidays, and some extra weeks. Sometimes I only have 4 hours a day, so it means that I have 2 hours were I can do nothing, or prepare for the next lessons.

All by all I think that I have a great job, I can make children smile, can enjoy myself, etc. The only thing is that I have to get used to the hours * waking up at 6* the amount of children in the class *40kids a class, while I normally am to shy to speak in front of less than 10 adults* the school, and teaching English.

So wish me luck for the upcoming weeks, and I will be writing more about this later on.

Greets,

Dave

4 comments:

Zen said...

Happy for you things are going well.
gambatte!

Anonymous said...

Wow, sounds like you will be super busy teaching! I'm very happy for you, though. I think you are a lof more hard working than many Japanese young people.

Take a very good care of yourself, Dave!
*big hug*

Misa

Lely said...

Hi ya.. I totally dun remember how I got to your site, but I like ur story... hope you overcome your loneliness, who says migrating is easy? hehehe... am married to a dutchie myself, and migrated from my lovely tropical place to cold cold land... but hey.. that's what love is all about! Good luck in the coming weeks with the teaching job. The David Beckham remark just made me smile... funny japanese kids!

ジョン said...

Awesome, DB. I envy you. I don't know that I have the guts to do something like that; yet, it sounds interesting and satisfying.