Yesterday concludes my first two weeks of teaching. While it’s felt like an eternity, it’s been a blast. I arrived for my first day on August 26th, bright and early in the morning. I found myself not feeling so nervous, as earlier in the month I had a chance to visit the school and meet some of the teachers and get myself familiar with the essentials, such as the layout of the school, my desk in the teacher’s room, and so on.
Upon entering the school, I was directed into the principal’s office to wait for the start of the morning meeting. I was told I would introduce myself to the staff and do another introduction to the students in the gymnasium later. Some new student teachers also came into the principal’s office for their own self introductions. Just about 10 minutes later, we all went into the staff room. Standing in front of nearly 40 teachers, I was the first to introduce myself. After a brief pre-introduction by the principal, I was left to my self introduction. It was quite short, just a few sentences in Japanese followed with a yoroshikuonegaishimasu: “looking forward to working with you” and a bow.
The meeting continued on with various announcements from the teachers and vice principal about the coming day, little of which I managed to catch. Shortly after the end of the meeting, the school doors were unlocked, and the students came in to head to their homerooms. It was about an hour later that I was called into the gymnasium, where the post-summer vacation assembly was already under way. The school year in Japan begins in the spring, so this was a resumption of the school year, rather than the beginning of it like in the US. I stood in the back with the other student teachers and watched the students all rise to do vocal warmups and sing the anthem of the school. After singing and more announcements, I eventually found myself at the front of the gym, heading up on stage with the principal. After more of the same pre-intro the principal had done in the staff room, I was left in front of the nearly nine hundred students attending my assigned school, the second largest in Sapporo.
I still didn’t find myself feeling very nervous at this point, mostly a mix between exhaustion and excitement. My intro wasn’t much more complex than my one I delivered to the staff, with the main exception of it being in simple English. I had already been asked by some of my fellow teachers not to let the students know that I could speak any Japanese, to avoid its use during class. I introduced myself, talked about where I was from, and my hobbies, and whatever else seemed relevant, all while keeping the level of English basic to the best of my ability.
Not long after leaving the stage, I got to using a bit of my Japanese with a teacher I was sitting next to. Nothing too complex and a few stumbles, but being one of the first Japanese-only conversations I had had at this point, it helped me feel a bit better about my ability to communicate.
The rest of the day was mostly consisted of the infamous desk warming, known far and wide across the JET program: sitting at your desk with little to do and just trying to look busy. With classes being mostly introductory, getting back into the swing of the year, I was left to have a chance to hone my self-introduction lesson I would be giving on Wednesday. Tuesday was a sports day at the nearby stadium, but this ended up being canceled due to rain, giving me another day of desk warming to, in theory, prepare my introduction more, but in practice, was a lot of sitting around looking busy.
With my Tuesday spent tweaking my presentation, creating new lesson plans, and studying Japanese, I was eager to finally meet my students first time on Wednesday. Junior high school is 3 years in Japan and I would be starting with a third year class for second period, giving me just about two hours after getting into school to make any last minute modifications and hype myself up. I was less worried about being in front of students and more about how my material would be received. I kept questioning myself If the presentation would be long enough, if the interactive parts and questions would get any response from the students, if jokes I had planned would fall flat or not.
The time passed quickly, and soon enough it was time to get going. Unlike schools in North America, students stay in their classroom while the teachers move room to room. After getting ready to go to the classroom myself, I was happy to be greeted by the teacher who I would be working with this period. Together we went off to what would be my first class.
Having little idea of what to expect besides what I had prepared, I simply followed suit. Entering the class, we were greeted with excited hello’s from the students, who I had heard were eager to finally meet me. With the school bell sounding the Westminster Quarters, a student led the class in sitting at attention and bowing. I managed to follow this procedure pretty on the fly, managing to bow in time in return. After a brief greeting and introduction, the reigns were handed over to me. Pulling up the presentation on the classroom TV, I began.
My self-introduction covered most of what one would expect for an introduction, hitting the classics like, name, where I’m from, hobbies and so on. It also had some info about the US, like food and music. As well as having the occasional moment to stop and ask a question, having students guess things like where I’m from, my age, and my height. This was all followed up by a quiz to see how much students had remembered and, finally, questions from the students themselves. Overall, it went quite well, students seemed interested, engaged and overall excited to take a break from things like worksheets and post-summer vacation tests, which were going on during the week. I must have been pretty nervous because I finished it all with about 10 minutes to spare, which was filled up with a word game by the teacher. This wouldn’t be an issue going forward as I got more used to grading comprehension, elaborating more on topics that sparked interest, and generally speaking slower. It wasn’t long before I was finding myself struggling to fit all I had into a single class period.
For my first week, I did 12 self intro lessons at 4 a day, which quickly started becoming quite stale after doing the same 50-minute presentation for the fifth or sixth time. The general attitudes of classes varied quite a bit more than I had expected, with some classes totally stone-faced while others chatty and excited. Regardless of the attitude of the class, I always managed to at least get a chuckle here and there. It was interesting seeing how the same joke would land hard in one class and fall flat in another. My self intro also went through some tweaking, delving more into what worked and got reactions and cutting things that didn’t.
Student questions at the end of the presentation were always quite funny as well. I got a real kick at the disappointment in the faces of a group of male students after one asked how old my sister was, only to find out she was much older than them. If I had a girlfriend was a popular question, which I responded to in various ways, from simple “it’s a secret”, to counting fingers on my hand, to reversing it with “Do you have a girlfriend?”.
Students are always quick to say hello when walking through the halls, some just shyly, others jumping out of their classrooms or running up to say hello. I get a lot of waves and enthusiasm when I leave school from the boys playing on the baseball field. I work hard to match and front this energy to help eliminate any shyness or hesitation about speaking English. My first week was not absent of dancing, singing, moonwalking, beatboxing and other goofy activity.
As well as classes from the standard grades, I am also in charge of teaching a special needs class. The first of these classes would be my first class taught on Thursday. Being only my 4th class taught thus far, I was quite nervous, being that I didn’t know what to expect at all of the levels of the students, any special requirements, what they could understand of English and so on. I contacted my predecessor to ask a bit about what I was going into and was reassured that they were great and would be shy at first. Overall, this ended up being one of my best classes taught. While they were shy, there were lots of smiles and excitement about the presentation.
With the first week done, all the Sapporo JETs gathered for a barbecue down by the local river as a celebration event for the new arrivals, as well as the end of the first week back at school. This was a great cap to my first working week at my school, as well as a great chance to interact with my seniors for the first time in a truly casual environment. It was also an opportunity to meet some of the seniors who I hadn’t met up until that point. This coupled with a lazy Sunday made for a both fulfilling and restful weekend.
My second week began with wrapping up the last few presentations of my self introduction, which I was incredibly happy for. I soon had my first chance to help out in a normal class. It was a simple lesson and activity about interrogatives (who, what, when, where, etc.). There were still a few self introduction lessons left to do, but the proper lessons helped break up the monotony. The week mostly followed the pattern of final self intros and normal lessons. I also got to do my second special needs class, which went great. The students are sweet and sincere; I really enjoy working with them.
For a class on Friday, I was asked to come up with ideas for an activity to help students with their phonics. Having been researching potential activities for quite some time during my downtime with desk warming, I managed to come up with an idea pretty quickly. I headed out to Daiso, which is basically a dollar store, and picked up two fly swatters. The activity involved the class being split up into two teams: team window and team door. The alphabet would be drawn on the board and teams would send students up to the front of the room. Each team representative would be given a flyswatter and stand by the board. I would make the sound of a letter, and the first to hit the letter on the board would earn a point for their team.
I was a little nervous going into this activity since I really didn’t know what to expect and how well the activity would be received, since I didn’t have much in the way of a contingency. The lesson began normally with various warm-ups and whatnot. It eventually came to the point where I took over to explain the upcoming activity. I explained the rules, split the teams and began the game. It was quite interesting to see the transition from a fairly quiet and shy class to a quite loud and excited one. The game was a huge success and even had teachers stopping in the hallway to observe the activity. The game ended up running the entire rest of the class, taking over the worksheet we had planned for after, and had many great moments from students making “W” signs with their fingers for and shouting “Team Window!” to the deciding point being won by a very shy girl chosen at random, this being met by enormous cheering from both teams. The success of the activity made for a great end of the week and will most certainly be done again in next week’s classes.
All in all, the last week and a half has been a lot of work, and I’ve been quite exhausted, but I’ve been having a great time so far. I love the students and, while a lot of time, I do enjoy being busy. I do reckon that I will start to walk in strides as I get more used to my schedule and improve my Japanese. Until then, I’ll be keeping it up and just having a good time as best I can.