Brian's Japan Adventure

Crunch time!

You’ll notice I skipped posting last week. I almost decided to skip this week as well. My schedule is just insane. It’s tough for the other students as well, but as a Graduate student, I have more work to do than the rest of them. In addition to the regular TEFL assignments, I need to do a book report, two research papers, a journal article presentation, a multi-journal-article special report, and probably something else that I’ve forgotten. Plus, I usually wind up in charge and organizing all the collaborative projects in which I’m involved because I’m “the experienced one.” It’s been a long and busy four weeks, and I’m getting worn down, I’ll admit it. The bright side is that there is only one more week to go, but the bad part is that there is just a TON of stuff left to do this week.

Let’s see, what have I done the past two weeks? I’ve done more lesson plans than I can remember; some were done only on paper and some were actually done in front of a real class of LEAPers. Syllabus design, lesson planning for reading, writing, speaking, listening, pronunciation, and integrated skills (basically a mix of all the others). It’s all good stuff, but once again, I whine about the schedule. PLEASE take my advice; if you are going to do some form of TEFL training, take it in a ten-week format, not an intensive one. “Intensive” is an extreme understatement. Two weeks of classes is too much to summarize here, let’s just say it was lots of good and practical teaching knowledge.

Ticket Trouble

As far as the non-training side of it goes, I bought my plane tickets Wednesday night. Friday I found out that they shifted arrival dates on me and the tickets might not be acceptable. Oh Joy! So right now I’m waiting to find out if the tickets I have are going to be acceptable or not.
I suspect they could be good enough if I got insistent about not wanting to change them, but I don’t want to make a bad first impression by being uncooperative. If I hear back fairly quickly, this change will only cost me another $300.

I’m Teaching WHAT!?!?

The email informing me about the date change also mentioned that I will be teaching Kindergarten. There will be other types of classes in addition to the kindergarten, but this is something I now know for a fact. Kindergarten. Yow. That’s some scary stuff there. Me, surrounded by thirty little screaming children who don’t speak ANY English. Yup, it’ll be an experience. I’d better read up on children’s activities. I had been told from the beginning that I might have to teach very young children, but it didn’t really sink in as a real possibility. This is not a bad thing, I’ll have fun with it, but it’s way out there from what I had in my mental picture of the future. At least they didn’t spring this on me at the last minute, and I do have some time to look into children’s stuff more closely.

Some Fun in the Future

I spoke this morning with a student who made the trip last year, and she said the Kindergarten class she did was in Hiroshima. Hiroshima is about 100 miles from where I’ll be staying. That sounds like a really long daily commute, doesn’t it? Maybe not! She says I’ll need to ride the Shinkasen there and back every day. The Shinkasen is the famous “bullet-train” that everyone has heard about. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia about this:

The Shinkansen (新幹線, Shinkansen?) is a network of high-speed railway lines in Japan operated by Japan Railways. Since the initial Tōkaidō Shinkansen opened in 1964 running at 210 km/h (130 mph), the network (2,459 km or 1,528 miles) has expanded to link most major cities on the islands of Honshū and Kyūshū with running speeds of up to 300 km/h (186 mph), in an earthquake and typhoon prone environment. Test run speeds have been 443 km/h (275 mph) for conventional rail in 1996, and up to a world record of 581 km/h (361 mph) for maglev trainsets, in 2003.

OK, I have to admit it. THIS sounds like fun! It’s possible that I might end up with a different Kindergarten or school than she had, but I’m thinking (hoping?) it’ll be the same one.

OK, in the last post, I did nothing but whine and complain about things. It’s not all bad, it’s just a lot to deal with. In all honesty, the classes themselves been loads of fun and I actually have learned quite a bit. We covered quite a lot of material this week, as you can probably imagine:

Textbook Evaluations
Evaluating and adapting materials and lesson plans
Teacher’s beliefs and training
and of course a lot of theory concerning international culture

And that’s mostly just the book-learning and classroom stuff. We have a great deal of student contact as well.  I was surprised to find that so much time is actually spent with real students, not just learning from books and lectures. That’s what I want to really talk about this time.

Monday: Breakfast tutoring in our”Workshop” class, LEAP students (again, they are the people here to learn English) come in for tutoring, help with homework, or just to talk. The teacher brings in breakfast, bagels and such, and they can eat and talk. This past Monday was the first time, and the turnout was poor, but I think it will pick up next time.

Tuesday: During the workshop class, from 8:30-10:00, the LEAPers come in as a full class and work on whatever our teacher has planned. This is a regular class for them, and we are there to help them through the assignments and just talk to them.

Wednesday: We don’t do students on Wednesday, that’s just our time for uninterrupted classroom stuff.

Thursday: Much like Tuesday, but this time WE do the teaching.  The TEFLers (teachers in training) work in groups to develop lesson plans and do little ten minute mini-lessons.  We are videotaped, and can watch ourselves on tape to improve. Everyone also evaluates everyone else, so there are LOTS of opinions on our lesson and teaching style. We’ve only done this once so far, but it will be a regular thing on Thursdays from now on. This time my partner and I did an activity concerning difficulties talking on the telephone. We acted out scripted phone calls and involved the students in talking about problems they have had with the phone. Since you cannot see the other person’s mouth or body language n the phone, many people learning English have trouble on the phone.  It was fun, and I think we did pretty good for our first time.

Friday: This is our Practicum day, where we sit in on the LEAP classes and watch their regular teachers and how they deal with the classes. I watched two different writing classes this week. I’m not going to go into details, but it was interesting to see how these students are both quite advanced and very crude in their writing. It’s an interesting combination. At lunchtime on Fridays, we have “Lunch with the LEAPers,” where the TEFLers gather in the lobby of one building andmeet unofficially with LEAPers needing help. There was some kind of big test in one of the classes this Friday, and several of the students wanted some clarification and help on test material.

I was planning on writing in this blog on a daily basis. I really was. But two factors have come up that changes that.

No Credit? Wah!

I was hoping to use this blog as an “Independent Project” toward my degree, and that’s not going to happen. It’s not “academic enough” to qualify.  That’s certainly true, but you’d think that since the school could use it for advertising for years to come they’d find a way to make it work. Oh well, there are still other options for the credits I need.  I’m still going to do the blog, primarily because I want to do it, but I’m not going to stress out over it if I don’t have to. Which brings me to the second point:

This workload is killing me! 

Three classes and a Practicum doesn’t sound like much. It really doesn’t; I have always taken three or even four classes a quarter in the past without any difficulty. The problem here is that they compress the classes in the summertime down to five weeks instead of ten. Does that mean they cut out a bunch of stuff? No! It means you have to do the same workload twice as fast. Instead of taking four classes, it’s more like taking EIGHT.  My time management skills are being put to the test like never before. On top of all that, since I am taking it at the Master’s level, I will have several additional papers and projects that I have not even begun yet.

The written assignments have been no problem, but where I run into trouble is all the reading. My problem is that in my previous courses I got into the habit of actually DOING all the assigned readings. I diligently read every word and actually try to understand the material. This is teaching, not nuclear physics, so it’s not especially complicated or difficult material, but I am a very careful reader.  I would actually feel guilty if I skipped a chapter or skimmed too quickly.
I would strongly recommend that if you are thinking about doing something like taking the TEFL program at a university, try to take it in a regular session, not a compressed one.

On the bright side, two weeks down, three to go. Or even better: two more school days until the halfway point.  I’m starting to think that going to Japan and actually doing teaching will probably feel like a break compared to the intensive training program.

Wow. That was a busy week.

Wednesday and Thursday were essentially repeats of Monday and Tuesday as far as events went. Lots of explanation, discussion and theory on Wednesday, and lots of interacting with LEAP students on Thursday. Sure, there was more to it than that, but I’m going to go light on the details so I can talk about Friday.

Fridays are the Practicum days. 

Every Friday, I will be assigned to observe some LEAP class and see how the class is taught and managed. Essentially it is learning by watching. Each week, I will be observing two 2-hour classes taught by two different teachers, for a total of ten classes by the end of the program.  This week I watched a LEAP level 2 (intermediate on a scale of 1-3) class on Speaking and Listening and another on reading. It was both fun and useful, and I can definitely understand why it’s a requirement. Things were not exactly what I was expecting (a great deal more chaotic than I had imagined), but educational because of that.

The first class was on Speaking and Listening. The teacher broke the class into several groups and had every student pick a fable/fairy tale from a list. The list was comprised of fables from around the world, so there should be at least a couple of stories that each student would know. Each student was to pick a fable from the list and tell it to the other group members. After this was done, they reported the stories to the entire class. It sounds pretty simple, but it was very involved, and the students seemed to have a lot of fun doing it.

The second class was also level 2, so many of the same students were in the class. This time it was a Reading class. They did vocabulary and read passages from their book, and so forth. There was nothing unexpected, and it was all pretty standard stuff. The teacher did assign me and the other observer to groups to help out, which made it much more interesting for me, but I probably confused the heck out of the students, since I hadn’t heard the teacher’s previous lessons. Ah well.

Overall, I did learn several new teaching tricks, and if the other Practicum days go like this one, I will learn a lot of good material.

Today was interesting. A few twists threw the schedule out of whack, but we adapted. That seems to be noe of the key elements with TEFL; things are going to get messed up and you have to be able to adapt. Flexibility is the key.

We met the LEAP students as promised. LEAP is an acronym for “Learning English for Academic and Professional Purposes.”  These are international students who are taking an intensive English course in order to be admitted to the University. There are eleven people in our TEFL class, and eleven LEAP students showed up for tutoring, so each tutor and teacher got matched up perfectly. This was purely coincidental.  Apparently, getting the LEAP people to show up regularly is problematic, and you just cannot predict who will show up and who won’t.  It’s one of the problems when dealing with people from multiple cultures; some groups treat time differently than we do.

From now on I will refer to two groups: LEAPers and TEFLers. The LEAPers are the non-English-speaking students and the TEFLers are my peers, the teachers-in-training. These are goofy-looking terms, but they are the most accurate way to identify the two groups.

Today was fun. Everyone introduced themselves and then we paired off. After that, we simply talked about why they were here, places they had visited, and very generic conversation. I was paired up with a girl from China who has been here since November, but many of the students are more recent. One girl came into the class for tutoring who had only been here for FOUR DAYS. That’s gotta be scary.  Dr. C. assigned the LEAPers to make a brief one-minute audio tape of a paragraph they are supposed to read. When they bring in the tape (on the day after tomorrow) we TEFLers will listen to the tape and judge it for pronunciation, fluency and comprehensibility.  We’ll be repeating this exercise several times duting the course.  The LEAP program emphasizes these three factors heavily.