After two days of work, my first impression was that it wasn't all that bad. Admittedly for my first day on Thursday, I did no teaching at all. However, I had to do an introduction in front of the entire school during the school's opening ceremony for the new semester. After that, I was pretty much writing up lesson plans for next week. Despite not teaching any classes that day, it was still productive. The vice principal was pretty friendly too, and had no problems answering any of my questions.
The school I worked at yesterday was my first real test, in that I was teaching 6th graders across 3 periods. Despite having a lesson plan, it could have gone better for my first class. I could not believe that 45 minutes went by really quickly. Fortunately I had two more classes of 6th graders to address the problems, and with the help of the home room teacher, the lesson went a lot smoother. He had no problem participating in demonstrations, or just some silly talk, especially when I did my introduction. Furthermore, he also gave me advice and suggestions for future classes, and him being there really took the edge off. I also had lunch with the one of the 6th grader classes - a meal consisting of spaghetti and meat sauce, something which I can only describe as a prawn croquette, small salad, a mandarin, and milk. It was a pretty decent meal, and while it is not free (it will be deducted from my salary), the daily cost for a lunch of that portion is pretty good - less than 300 yen a day easily.
After lunch, I spent more time preparing lesson plans for next week. Also, the teacher who gave me the tour of the school on Wednesday invited me to help her and some of the other teachers to walk the younger students off campus to the nearest shopping center where many children's parents were waiting to pick them up. Naturally, all the children wanted to talk to me, especially since some of them have never seen a foreigner before. Being able to speak Japanese made it a lot easier when they wanted to ask me a variety of questions, including favourite foods, favourite colours, pets, bugs, etc.
It was kind of amusing to see their reactions when hear a foreigner speaking Japanese to them for the first time. Even funnier when I was listening to the conversation during lunch time, before I started asking them questions in Japanese, and they were shocked to realise that I understood what they said earlier.
As I mentioned in my previous post, most of the teachers at this school are young - some I think are younger than me. Including the home room teacher, and the teacher who gave me the tour, there was another teacher who seemed to really have fun talking with me in Japanese/English. He admits that his English isn't all that good, but it didn't seem to stop him from coming up to my desk to see how I was going for my first day at the school.
Between the two schools I am working at, I enjoyed being at the school I was working at yesterday. However, considering that I did not do any teaching on Thursday at school, I feel that this is an unfair comparison. On the other, I felt a bit more welcomed at the second school, though that is not to say that first school's staff are d*cks or anything, it might be because the teachers are a bit older, it might be they might have a harder time interacting with me because I'm younger than them. Or, it could be something different. In any case, I will wait and see in the following weeks to see how this turns out.
Overall, it was a good experience, and the one thing I learned was that 45 minutes can go by really quickly, and therefore, I need to be more strict on time management when it comes to teaching future lessons.
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