September 27th, 2007
New Classes!
This was a long day, and it looks like the first of many. I had a meeting at 9:00 with the professor I was supposed to meet last week and didn’t. He seems like a nice enough guy and should be easy to work with. He gave me a textbook that his class uses and told me to create a 40-45 minute lesson for each week to go along with the book. Sine he’s following the text pretty closely, I won’t have to dig very hard for topics, which seems to be my weak point right now. After I finish my lesson, he will take over and teach the rest of the lesson in Japanese. I only have this class on Mondays, so there are only 13 classes the entire time I am here. I’ll work on the lesson over the weekend; no problem.
After that meeting, I had an actual class to teach with another professor here. He gave me the wrong text to prepare for last week, and then he brought the wrong CD to class with him as well. He even gave me the wrong room number to meet him; fortunately I caught him coming up the stairs! So this week wasn’t much of a lesson. It was the first day of class, so he went over the syllabus and course requirements, in Japanese, of course. About halfway through, asked me to introduce myself, which I did. He then had each of the students (about 30 of them) ask me a question. They all asked in Japanese, which the professor translated; this doesn’t look promising for an English class, but they all seemed interested in me personally at least.
The very first question was from a group of girls “Do you have a girlfriend?” When I answered no, they went crazy. I think this might be fun after all! Unfortunately, later in the class someone asked how old I was, and I forgot to lie. So much for college girls! (Or maybe not, they still hung around after class to talk).
At some point I mentioned I had been to Hiroshima, and someone asked me about the Atomic Bomb, “Do you believe it was necessary to use the bomb to win the war?” Gak! I had the same question from an old man yesterday. Both times I gave the answer that “We didn’t need to use the bomb to win, but with that technology available, someone would have used it somewhere eventually and that maybe we all learned something from it.” Personally, I think the Japanese at the time were desperate and fanatical enough to defend Japan to the last man if they could and that the using the Atomic Bomb probably cost less lives in total, but no, I know better than to say that in a classroom. Of course it wasn’t a good thing, but like most terrible things, I think a lot of good eventually came from it. And besides, I’m not a historian, so who cares about my opinion?
Eventually the questions ended, and he let the class go a little early. We talked about next week, and he gave me a copy of the right text for that class. He wants me to go through the text and pick out on important or interesting sentence from each paragraph and talk about it in detail. My portion of the lesson needs to take abut 40 minutes. It seems like a good enough idea, but the texts are pretty short, so I may need to do more to fill the time. This is my regular Thursday class from now on.
I then came home for a few hours before Japanese class. I sat on the couch to read my Japanese textbook and fell asleep. Fortunately Marc woke me up when he finished his class with the same professor doing the same thing immediately after me. The days are getting longer and more stressful now that there is actual work to do. I’m glad I got most, if not all, of my planned sightseeing done already. The work really starts now.
In Japanese class, the teacher handed out some worksheets and wanted us to write the answers in Japanese. Yeesh! I know the vocabulary, and I can read the hiragana just fine now, but putting the words into hiragana is really tough. I can match the letters to the sounds (reading) just fine, but matching the sounds to the letters (writing) is a lot harder than I expected. I think I’ve said before that I have no real interest in learning to write in Japanese, but at this stage, I can see the value of this kind of exercise. I guess I’m not as comfortable with hiragana as I thought. Actually Marc finished at about the same time, so I guess he is picking it up pretty quickly- maybe faster than me since I practiced this stuff before coming over here. Uh-oh!
And that pretty much wraps up today. I’m going to read the Haiku book a little bit and go to bed early. Tomorrow, Marc and I will go downtown to pick up our Foreign Registration cards and then head to the train station early to meet Mrs. Y and go to Fukuyama with her. She’s never been there either and ants to see the Elementary school we will teach at for herself. I guess this is a new client for the company. It’s easy to forget that I work for an “education conglomerate” and not individual schools, but it’s all business if you get far enough into it. So anyway, tomorrow we are visiting and meeting with the elementary school that we will both be visiting on Fridays. Since we aren’t leaving until noon, and it’s a decent train ride, I expect it’ll take all day tomorrow just for travel and a few meetings. Normally, we’d leave much earlier than that and hopefully get home early.
Saturday I am hoping to return to the beach one more time before fall hits. It was actually a little cooler today (mid 80’s) so fall is really coming. But not this weekend I hope. I also want to go to the library this weekend and get a library card as well as get someone to show me how to get the Internet working there. You need a library card ID to make the computer work is why I ha problems last weekend. I’ll have my foreign registration card, so that should be enough to get started. And, of course, I now have lessons to prepare for next week.
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