Online once again!

Hey everyone!

Sorry about the long delay between posts! I just finally got internet at my house, 2 months after applying for it. Japan has excellent customer service however there can be a lot of red-tape to cut through in certain situations. To make a long story short I had to go through two companies before someone would come and install my internet. At least the guy who came to install my internet sat down with me and loaded all the software I needed since it was all in Japanese. Quite a lot has happened since the last post. I have been to Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara, where we saw some amazing shrines! Nara has the largest wooden structure on Earth and it is only two-thirds the size it was when it was first built hundreds of years ago!!

This is my favourite picture so far. It was taken in Kyoto at a shrine called kiyo-mizu-dera or clear-water-shrine. (きよみずでら)

So far school has been going well. I teach anywhere from 0-4 periods of 6 per day. The students at my base school are intelligent and they are easy to teach. I also have placements at a blind school and a school further into the country. The blind school is a very interesting and different experience. It was hard for me to plan lessons at first, but I have learned to provide them with something concrete to touch and speaking a lot. It is good because there are only 4 or fewer students in these classes so you can do many different activities with them. My school in the country is a bit more challenging to teach. Many of them will probably never leave Japan and end up working on a farm or somewhere rural, so they have little motivation to learn English. Thankfully my JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) at the school is fantastic and we both hope to change the students’ outlook on English learning. The education system here is much different than that from home, especially language learning. A huge emphasis is placed on reading and writing with little concern for speaking. Unfortunately the entrance exam to get into university is purely written and is actually quite difficult even for a native speaker. That being said, the schools therefore stress written English and much of it is taught as a teacher-centered lesson where students write down a sentence from the board, repeat the sentence after the teacher. As well CDs are used frequently as students follow along in their textbooks. Luckily I am given pretty much total freedom so I plan completely different lessons for the kids. I get to teach the same lesson probably 15 times to all the first year classes in each school so I get to tweak the lesson every time and it improves each time. So far I have done broken telephone which is hilarious because students have trouble pronouncing Ls and Vs so you get some amusing sentences. Overall, my job is fulfilling and I'm enjoying it! Promise the next post will come sooner than 2 months later ;)