Brian's Japan Adventure

OK they’re gone. Over and out!

Or so I thought. As soon as I got home, there was an additional surprise. Before they left, a few of them had little gifts. One gave me a little Japanese towel with writing of something on it. It’s nice, and I’ll try to translate it later. But they also handed me a card, and I didn’t look at it until I got home.

And I have the full size scan here if you can’t make it out: Link.

A couple of these students are located in the town I’ll be staying in, so I hope I really do get the chance to see them again. Maybe as soon as next weekend.

The End.

Next time… The final countdown begins!

I finished the Culture Project last night. That was the last project for the TEFL class, or so I thought. I had completely forgotten something called the “TEFL Portfolio.”  The portfolio is basically a collection of all the major assignments and papers I did during the course, along with a very short essay about my experiences.

I did the essay pretty quickly. After all the writing I’ve done recently, there wasn’t much to that one. Then comes the work of assembling the portfolio. Finding the right kind of “baggie” to put a videotape in, printing off dividers to go between pages, creating a table of contents and title page, and so forth. Nothing difficult, but it just ate up two hours.  I’ll turn it in later this week, and then I will finally, actually be DONE with ALL the TEFL stuff. I don’t know if they will keep this portfolio or return it to me. I’d kinda like to keep it.

And a follow up to my “Week Off” posting a while back. My predictions about my Japan partner were 100% accurate. He wanted to get together Sunday and work on it. The thing was due Monday, and even if it wasn’t already finished (did it the previous weekend), I couldn’t have done anything with his material that close to the deadline anyway!  I hate to be a hardass about it, but he knew the deadlines, he knew the timetable, he knew what he was supposed to be doing, and he even used the phrase “We’ll bang it out this week and get this sucker done!” before he vanished. I don’t know if he thought I’d just stick his name on it or if I had really waited that long after telling him I couldn’t. The last I heard, he was going to try doing the whole thing by himself this weekend. Not my problem.

And now, the next big project begins, which I will discuss in tomorrow’s posting!

Ah. Free at last!

Friday was the last day of classes for me. The memoir class was WAY more fun than I expected, and is definitely in the top two or three classes I’ve ever taken. I wish there had been more creative writing classes available during my time as a student. If you’d like to read some of my stories, go to http://www.thearcaneum.com and look in the “Creative Writing” section. My user name there is “Dr. Arcane.” I still have a few more to finish up and proofread, but I expect they’ll all be posted within a few days.

When I last posted here, I had four TEFL projects that needed to be done, and as of now three of them are completed and only one remains, which is the project for today (and tomorrow if I have a bad day). After that, I have those stories to clean up and turn in, followed by my Master’s Independent Paper to finish up, and I’m done with school, maybe forever. That’s scary. I had originally planned to go for another year and then apply to some PhD schools, but this TEFL thing came up and I’m going that route instead. I guess I could still do the PhD later, but I have my doubts. Anything is possible, so we’ll just have to see.

Although I have until the 16th or 17th to get all these assignments done, I really need to do as much as I can before Wednesday. I have another big project starting then that I’ll describe further in another posting. It’s very heavily related to the Japan trip, so I’ll be postings lots of details about that, probably daily. So stay turned, things are about to heat up around here in the final weeks before I leave.

I’d like to call this a week off, but that’s not completely accurate. True, there were no classes this week, but as I previously mentioned, there is still a lot of written work to do. To make a long story short, I have finished two research papers for the TEFL classes, and a large portion of my final Independent Paper for my Master’s degree. I still also have a culture project for one class that I haven’t given much thought to yet.

The real problem is the collaborative course project. I’m “collaborating” with two other students from the TEFL class, one of whom is my Japan traveling partner, and the other is just a girl from class who has been to Japan in the past. We had an “organizational meeting” for this project about two weeks ago, and we split up assignments. I was eager to take on the role of “leader” and do the organizational work since I know what I want done and I know what grade I want- I don’t want those decisions made for me by some slacker. Well, to sum up the problem, the girl from class has sent me her share of the work, and it’s a little weak. She knows this and promises revisions soon, so I can’t complain too much there (yet). My Japan partner, on the other hand, has done nothing but contacted me to let me know he couldn’t attend a meeting last week. ZERO work on the project.

This thing is 50% of the grade in one course.  I already have a pretty good idea how this thing is going to play out.  Two of us are going to have this thing finished next weekend. Someone will be emailing me a few days before it is due wanting to know how the project is going. One of the three of us is probably going to fail the course. I am NOT nice enough to sign his name to the paper without a significant contribution. I do not tolerate “slackassiness” (a new word!). Will this keep him from going to Japan? No, not by itself; if he gets dropped from the program, it won’t be my fault.
I’m patient; there is still time before this thing is due.  Oh, how I hate collaborative projects!

Actually thinking about this whole project… How or when will I *EVER* collaborate on designing lesson plans in the future? My understanding is that I’ll be very much on my own when teaching overseas, so it seems worthless to assign us to collaborate now.

Friday was the last day of TEFL classes. Five weeks down, just as promised. Well, not exactly. You see, they realize that the workload in that five weeks is crazy, so they give additional time for some of the work. I have two research papers, a cultural project and a huge collaborative project to work on.  they generously give us all month to do these things.  The problem is, I have another tough class starting on the 23rd, so I only have a week to get as much of this stuff done as I can.

Today I went to school for a meeting with my collaborators on the collaborative project. One of them didn’t show up, the other had nothing done. I had my syllabus all typed up and ready to fill in with their lesson plans. No dice.
I don’t know why this was set up as a collaborative project, those things are nothing but a pain in the butt. I’ll probably NEVER collaborate on something like that in real life.  I set a “due date” of Thursday for the lesson plans, let’s see if they listen to me. If not… Well, I can always turn in the collaborative project missing a name or two, right?  Since it’s 50% of their grade, they ought to be motivated.  OK, so I’m a slave-driving taskmaster. I can live with that.

Still, the six-hour-a-day classes are over, and things are on the downhill slope now. I’ve got a few more hurdles to get through this summer, and you’ll be hearing about them shortly!