Brian's Japan Adventure

February 14th, 2008

In Business

I slept a little late today. Something yesterday must have worn me out more than usual. My back is much improved, but still not fully back to normal. I left the house around 11:00 for the library. I wanted to see if anything had come from my Work on Monday, so it was off to the library. When I got to the bus stop, I found that it would be another 20 minutes before the next bus, so I just rode the bike all the way to the library today. The buses don’t run as often in the afternoons, and I missed “rush hour” for today.

I plugged in and turned on as usual. I found that Mac OS X had an update since Monday, so I downloaded and installed that. It only took a minute to download, but more like fifteen minutes for it to install and apply patched and reboot. Eventually I was able to start my work.

I haven’t heard back from Apple about my Podcast submission for iTunes. I had expected to hear something by now; they must be overloaded. I fiddled a little bit with project #2, but without hearing from Apple, not much new happened there. I made two small sales from project #1 since Monday, so now I know everything works. EBay is having a discount listing day today, so I posted an auction listing for the service I am offering for project #3, so now that one is actually active as well; I may have actual work to do this weekend!

TEFL Whining and The Future

Other than a little follow-up on the three projects, there really wasn’t that much to do. I posted blogs and answered emails. I then popped on over to some of my favorite TEFL/teaching overseas sites and looked at what was new. Nothing really. People are complaining that they can’t make a living in South America, which was something I had been considering for Next Time. With those loans coming due, decent pay is going to be a necessity. I could get by on what they pay here, but not much less.

I am going to look for some kind of professional writing job when I get back, but I am not thinking more specifically than that. If nothing comes up by the end of summer (I’m not planning on rushing), then more TEFLing is a real option. Or possibly not, since I STILL don’t actually have my certificate in-hand (or at home). I fired off yet another email to Dr. M back at the home university. I don’t care if I do look impatient. It’s just lucky that I haven’t really tried to find a job yet; if I had been trying, this would have been a real problem. Marc doesn’t really seem to care, but then he has more regular classes to take when he gets home, so more TEFLing isn’t really his best option right now anyway.

Biking The Town

I didn’t stay at the library very long, just long enough to make sure everything was running smoothly with #1 and #3. Since I had my bike with me this time, I rode to Mos Burger and had the same thing as yesterday. It’s too far to walk there normally, and I don’t know which bus to take, so I rarely get the chance to hit Mos Burger in Okayama. I think this may have only been the second time that I have gone to the one here. It was a pretty easy ride, so I may have to do it more often. It’s about the same price as CoCo, and I get to save a few hundred yen in bus fare anyway, so why not?

On the way home, I stopped in at Happy Town and picked up some more Pepsi Nex. I wonder if they have Pepsi Nex at home now? I’d never seen it before coming here, and I am thoroughly hooked. There is Coke everywhere here, and Zero-Calorie Coke as well (they don’t call it “Diet Coke” here). They do not have either regular Pepsi or Diet Pepsi, but they do have zero-calorie Pepsi Nex. I then zipped on home and typed up the blog for both yesterday and today.

One Short Class Tomorrow: The Tough One

It’s currently around 6pm. I’m going to do the Bingo game again tomorrow, but I don’t think that is going to be enough. The vocabulary level of tomorrow’s kids is low, so I think the stage where they call out entertainment activities and I write them on the board will be too short. I still need to think of something to fill about 20 minutes of class time. One good brief game should do it.

Let’s take Inventory

Fukuyama:

• 3 more Friday classes
• 2 more Tuesday Junior High days
• 1 more Tuesday High School days
• 2 more Tuesday Chat Room
• 5 days of a crash course in “Traveling To America” from March 3rd-8th

Hiroshima:

• 4 more Kindergarten days (3 of them are Parent Days)
• 4 more of each adult class at the Community Center (but the last day will be two parties)

Which I think is actually fourteen more actual work days. Not that I’m counting the days or anything!

February 13th, 2008

One Month To Go

The day started out about like usual. I packed light today, leaving the laptop at home. It turned out I was right about that class in the computer room, so there was no point in carrying it along anyway.  The Shinkansen announcements were stating a 15-minute delay in the trains; I never heard the news, but I’m guessing there was another jumper.  They really need to start painting these things red; it might make them easer to wash.  Anyway, I usually have to wait a bit before my train leaves anyway, so I just got in line for an earlier train that still hadn’t arrived. I ended up rriving in Hiroshima just about at the usual time.

I did the usual stuff with the kids, mostly reviewing. When I was done, Mr. Kindergarten reminded me that next week was Parent’s Day for the 4-year-old class. I knew that. But he said he would tell me next week what to do during the class. I assume that means he wants me to go through certain routines with them that they know very well, which is what I had planned anyway.

Don’t Eat That Oyster, Read the Label First!

Then it was time for the Community Center. In the first class, we talked about our weeks. One student mentioned that she liked oysters, but that they were often poisonous in the summer. I had no ideas oysters were season, but then I don’t eat them, so why should I?  I did get in a good line about looking at the label on the bottom of the oyster; if it says “Made in China” you should throw it back. They roared. China and the poison dumplings are still all over the news here. Apparently, the leader of China finally admitted they were responsible, something everyone over here already knew.

Comics and Liars

We then played “Two truths and a lie” a game where everyone writes down two true statements about themselves and one untrue one. The student then reads the three things and the class has to pick out the lie. One of the students made the (true) statement that he collected comic books. We have a stack of Batman comics here at the apartment that some former student had left here in the past, so I think I’ll take a few of those in next week for them to look at. American comics are very different from Japanese comics. In Japan, comics are on dull recycles paper, black and white, and as long as phone books for 250Y. In America, they are on glossy paper, full color, about 16 pages, and $3.00.  It’s a very obvious quality/quantity comparison. American comics are higher quality, but there isn’t much there, while Japanese comics focus on quantity at the expense of quality.

Then it was break time. I walked to Mos Burger and had both the Jalapeno Burger and Jalapeno Hot Dog. One thing I have to say about most of the food over here is that it’s very bland. At least with the jalapeno burger, there’s something to actually taste.  The other day I was talking to Marc, and he told me that the first thing he was going to get when he got home was a giant steak burrito from Chipotle. I laughed and laughed, because I have (too often) thought the exact same thing. I think out of all things that I like to eat, those are what I miss most, narrowly beating out pizza.  They have pizza here, but it’s not really the same; burritos are just plain non-existent.  Come to think of it, even the one Mexican place I have been to in Japan didn’t offer burritos.  I walked back to the Community Center and listened to more Podcasts until it was time for the late class to start.

He Looks Like… Me?

The Old Man was the first one in the door. He usually arrives first, and then everyone else shows up ten to twenty minutes after the start of class. Japanese people are usually very punctual, but not this group. The Old Man is growing a beard. He looked a little “fuzzy” last week, but it’s much clearer this time. It’s exactly the same shape and style as mine. I didn’t press him on it, but it seems I am making a fashion impression here after all. Beards are just very unusual here, and the fact that he’s growing it now, in exactly the same style as mine, is just too much to put down to coincidence.  What can I say other than I just look soooo cool!

In class, we talked about many things, but our main activity was a vocabulary list of Recreational Activities and Hobbies. They were most interested in this thing we call “genealogy.”  None of them knew what it meant, but of the twenty or so activities on my list, genealogy took nearly thirty minutes to discuss.  I got to hear all about how old samurai used to lie about their family histories. You would think that with a civilization/nation as old as Japan, that they would know all about their family histories, but that does not seem to be the case. I guess if you come from an important family, you probably know that, but otherwise, it seems that they don’t bother remembering ancestors who were only farmers.  I have to say, this surprises me; I would have figured ancestry to be a big deal here.

Valentine’s Day

At the end of the day at the Kindergarten, the ladies there gave me a little bag with candies and a card. I’d forgotten all about Valentine’s Day, but they hadn’t.  In the early afternoon class, one of the ladies gave me a gift bag with chocolates in it, and another gave me a box of candy. In the evening, one of the ladies brought me some kind of cake that she said she made with tofu. I haven’t tried that yet, I’ll be sure to mention it when I taste it.

They explained how Valentine’s day works here. Historically, women get gifts for any man that they know. It’s not necessarily romantic, but being a man-centric world, it stands to reason that the men wouldn’t have to buy gifts for the women. I guess I have to be thankful that it works like that, or I’d look bad for not knowing about it.  Naturally, this led to class discussion about how the holiday works in America and the differences in cultures. One student said Christmas Eve in Japan was very romantic, but Valentines Day wasn’t about that at all. Huh. More surprises!

And then it was time to come home. The trains were all back on schedule, and I walked in the front door and went right to bed. It was a long day!

One To Go

Today was the 13th.
One month from tonight, I will be back in the States.
One month and one day from tonight, I will have eaten a burrito.

February 12th, 2008

A Day That Went Well

This morning started off about like usual.  I got up and got ready to go, but since I don’t leave until 11:15, I still had plenty of time left over. Breakfast consisted of bread and butter and an ice cream cone. I listened to the “Podcasting for Dummies” companion podcast episodes 1-9 in about an hour before I left the house.  When it was time to go, I hopped on the bike, rode to the station, and by the time I reached Fukuyama, I had hit episode 15.

I walked along the cold windy highway to the school. Fukuyama is always cloudy and always windy.  I need to check a map, but I’m pretty sure they must be pretty near the ocean, since that would explain why their weather is so different from Okayama. Anyway, it’s only a fifteen-minute walk from the station to the school, but most of it is along a very busy highway. Between various road noises, I can’t even listen to my audio shows with the volume all the way up.

Today’s Classes and Asses

I timed it so that my arrival would be too late for lunch but early enough that I could make copies. The assistant principal ambushed me in the teacher’s lounge, but rather than taking me to lunch, he wanted to make my copes for me. That was fine with me; they don’t seem to trust me to run a copy machine by myself. Maybe they think we don’t have copiers in the States. Right now I have a mental picture of the old Xerox commercial that had the huge room full of monks copying everything by hand when one guy wheels in the first copy machine…

…But anyway, he made my 75 copies and it was off to class. The first class is the youngest group of the day. They are all eager to participate, but some are too eager. There’s one student who speaks especially good English, but he acts like a perfect little jackass throughout the duration of the class, yelling, singing, running around, and showing off like… I can’t describe it; I’ve never seen anyone act like that in American schools.  He is a major disruption though; if I were the “real” teacher, I would have had him in the principal’s office two weeks ago. The regular teacher does nothing to keep him in line. A couple of times, I got his attention BY GETTING LOUD, but I can’t do that through the entire class period.

I started off the class by writing the word “Entertainment” on the board and asking if they knew what it meant. Nope. O under that, I wrote “what we do for fun.”  They understood that just fine. We spent the next 25-30 minutes writing ideas and words of things we do for fun on the board. The first three or four were hard to get; like pulling teeth, but after they got the idea, the ideas flowed.  We ended up with more than 50 words on the board “watch TV, running, kendo, reading, skydiving, travel, sleeping, baseball,” and dozens of other “fun” activities.

Then we played “Entertainment Bingo,” I handed out a blank 4×4 grid with pictures and names of various activities. They wrote the activities randomly in the squares.  I then drew the activities from cards that I had previously prepared. I didn’t have any prizes, but the regular teacher went to her office and brought back a page full of stickers. I would have thought these kids were too old to appreciate getting stickers, but it was better than nothing, I guess. Then we played a second round, but this time I had them draw the cards and read the activity names for their classmates. For the remaining minutes of class, we played a repeat of last week’s “guess the letters” game, only using the new words from this week. I hadn’t planned on using this game again until the final class, but I had some extra time to fill. Bingo on a 4×4 grid doesn’t take as long as I had planned!

I then essentially repeated this activity for the other two classes. The high school kids came up with more than 60 words. They are usually the quietest group, but they seem to be getting used to me now, and they were really getting into it today. I wish the college kids would be as interested in participating, but their chance is gone.

Many (maybe all, I don’t know) of the junior high students are going skiing somewhere tomorrow, so they had a meeting for that after school, leaving nobody but two very young students to come to the chat room. They were both pretty much afraid to speak, but we got through it. Overall, everything went pretty well today; it seems my classes are getting more consistent.

Then it was a quick cold walk back to the train station, and on the way back I heard all the rest of the “Podcasting for Dummies” series. I must have way too much travel time if I can get through an entire series in just one day.  I picked up the same thing I had yesterday from the Kamodoya Carryout and watched a rerun of what is probably the worst episode of Doctor Who ever filmed on TV. For a relatively low-budget show like Doctor Who, saying “Worst Episode Ever” is quite an accomplishment.

Tomorrow’s Plan

And here I am, a little after 9:00, getting ready to select my papers and materials for tomorrow’s Culture Center classes. I have plenty of stuff to use; it’s just a matter of choosing what I want to do. Tomorrow will be easy, but I keep dreading the following week where I promised to do “All Grammar, All day.” YUCKO! We don’t even have a grammar textbook here at the apartment!

I think tomorrow is the last normal day of kindergarten before the all-important parent days that will be coming up. So I need to hit the review material hard tomorrow; build them up with what they know and abandon the stuff they aren’t quite getting. I think the rest of my kindergarten experience is going to be a performance on par with my Santa stint, hopefully with less singing.

On the plus side, I will leave the computer at home tomorrow. That class in the computer lab will probably still be in session, and I don’t have anyone to chat with this week, so I can carry a light load for once. Maybe I’ll even take an actual book for once. I stopped halfway through Suzuki’s “Essays in Zen Buddhism” more than a month ago, and still haven’t finished it.

February 11th, 2008

Loose Ends Day

I decided to skip the library today and wrap up all the various loose ends I had been ignoring for a while. I created a few web pages for project #1, fine-tuned a few things on project #3, and wrote some new material for #2. I figured I have been doing well working on three projects at once, but yesterday I got idea #4, so I think it may be time to actually finish up a few things.

Surprisingly, I finished everything I could think of by 1 pm. Around two, I decided to go to the library and actually implement the stuff I had been working on. They were very crowded; apparently many people wait for holidays to go to the library!

Anyway, Project #1 is now finished, and actually currently online and open for business. It’s infinitely expandable, so it will never actually be “done,” but in theory, I could actually make money yet tonight. The same goes for project #3, although that one will need some form of advertising before anything will come of it. But it, too, is ready to roll when I am ready. Project #2 is the complicated one with the pod cast; today I think I got set up on iTunes, but I’ll have to wait for them to contact me before I can really verify that. I guess it’s safe to say that all the set-up and design work is finished for #2 as well. The bottom line is that all three are ongoing projects that can be expanded whenever I am in the mood or have time, but won’t eat any of my time unless I want them to, unlike my old days of selling actual widgets.

On the way home from the library, it was getting late, so I stopped off at the carryout and got my usual. As I watched the news, they are still going on about the poison dumplings from last week. The last I heard, there weren’t even any fatalities from the poison; I don’t quite get what the big deal is all about nearly two weeks after the discovery of the problem.

Tomorrow

So my three business projects are now more or less done. Time to move on. Tomorrow is Fukuyama, and I have a few new games planned. We’ll do a sort of “vocabulary bingo” that I have a worksheet for and fill the remaining time with “20 Questions” or as they call it here, “What am I?” Simple enough.  I haven’t found anything new for the Wednesday groups. For the past two or three weeks now, we haven’t even begun the materials I have been bringing in, so this week we will be focusing on using up some of the old material.

February 10th, 2008

Just Like Yesterday

Slept late and went downtown late as well. Yes, it was library day yet again.  What can I say other than I’ve seen about everything Okayama has to offer, and my back still hasn’t fully recovered, so I still don’t want to do anything major anyway. Maybe I’ll fit in an “adventure” next weekend. It won’t be a long weekend like this one, but I’ll still have Saturday, Sunday, and Monday next week.

I knew I wanted to pick up the latest episode of LOST, and it was available today so I downloaded it quickly.  I ended up watching it later in the evening, and yes, it’s very good. I can’t wait for next week’s episode.

I did a whole bunch of research into how to post podcasts to the Internet. It’s actually a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. Posting an MP3 file is easy enough; it’s the same as uploading any other kind of file to a website. Getting the RSS feed set up so people can subscribe to it is another matter.  I set up a Wordpress plug-in called Podpress on project #2, and I think after a lot of tinkering that it is working now. There’s an embedded audio player right in the Wordpress posts, which is good for people who don’t use iTunes or don’t already know what to do with an MP3 file. I set up what I think is a feed link and it loaded into my iTunes player, so I think that’s working too, but I still want to play with a few things before I claim it’s done. I haven’t even tried getting it into the iTunes store or Feedburner yet.

Remember, all of this Podcasting talk is for one of my new projects and has no effect on JapanTEFL.com, at least not yet. Unfortunately, by the time I get all this stuff figured out and working, my Japan Adventure will be mostly over.  That’s OK, I’d rather work with text for this site anyway.

Loan Me Some Time

I also did some research concerning my student loans. Half my payments (For my undergraduate degree) start on March 5th, and the other half (for the Master’s) start “sometime” in May. The interest rate on the latter loan is significantly higher than the other, although the balance is smaller. I think I will try to eliminate the second loan as quickly as possible. It appears that I can indeed get a deferral due to my being in an Internship program, but I am not sure if I actually want to do it yet.  I think it’s going to require another phone call to talk to them directly.

I stopped by Happy Town on the way home and did the grocery thing. I watched Lost in the evening and then read some more documentation on Podcasting as well. It’s currently 8:30, and I am not sure where the rest of the evening will go.

Tomorrow is Monday, and it’s also a holiday. Strangely, the library will be open tomorrow and closed Tuesday instead. When a national holiday falls on a Monday, they are open for the convenience of the people and they get their day off on Tuesday. I’m not sure what the holiday is for; I’ll have to ask my students on Tuesday or Wednesday. I could either go and do the library tomorrow or not; I think I have things where I need them to be for right now, but there’s plenty of fiddling I can still do if I want to.  I think I would just as soon not go there five days in a row, so I’ll try hard to find something else to do tomorrow.