Secondary Chronology - 2 Months, July 10th

Secondary Chronology

2 Months

Here's the promised Q&A. If anyone else wants to send in questions, I'll gladly answer them next week too. I didn't really give anyone much time to respond...

Q: What's it like teaching for GEOS?

A: I've found it's been pretty fun so far. There's a fairly large difference though from school to school in the atmosphere that you'll experience. My school is just about perfect for me. I have a wide breadth of students of various levels of competency so it's always interesting for me. I'm glad I don't have a ton of kids classes, because those require a lot of energy. I haven't experienced too much business pressure yet, but I've been doing fairly well outside of that.

Q: How does teaching work?

Well, GEOS runs two kinds of classes, Active and Sprint. Active classes are 60 minutes long and use text books much like the ones you might have had in high school for French lessons. They're more conversation focused and teachers often incorporate extra activities into the lesson. These classes can be difficult to plan for because the texts are taught on a page by page basis and don't have a rigid structure. Sprint lessons are different, and only 45 minutes long. Sprint, first of all, works on a calendar. The great part about this is that you teach the same lesson to every class of the same level all week. So, say I have 3 Sprint 6x classes in a week, I only build the props and plan it out once because I know that this week I'll be teaching only lesson 13. It also means that once you've done all of the lessons in the book you won't have to prepare any more. I should be done planning for Sprint 6 in about 3 weeks for example, because I have a number of private students that are learning the book at a different pace then the calendar. If a student misses a class, they miss the lesson unless they take it during another class of the same type later in the week. The content of Sprint is generally less conversational then Active. There's some conversation in every lesson, but also a lot of pure mechanical practice and whatnot. Sprint is much more focused then Active lessons. The kids lessons are called CoDoMo and they are also on a calendar. They're not bad, but require a lot of props and the text changes every year so you can't reuse your plans.

In reagards to time required to plan I'd lay it out like this, most time to least:

CoDoMo
Sprint
Active

In difficulty to teach, most to least:

Active (depending upon class)
CoDoMo
Sprint

I teach 3 levels of Sprint in theory, 6, 7, and 8, although right now I have no Sprint 7s. My coworker Sean takes care of all of those. In return he has few 6s and no 8s other then a couple private lessons. I teach A LOT of higher level active courses, especially a book called New Headways, which is very tough.

Q: How is working as a teacher different then working as a projectionist?

A: Quite. First of all, you can't have a shitty day. If you're feeling like crap you have to kick yourself in the ass and start smiling, because your students aren't going to respond well if you're bitching and moaning. Obviously, the work requires far less physical effort, and much more in the way of people skills. It was a bit of an adjustment from being a projectionist. I also can't afford to be late. At all. I've been between 1 minute and 3 hours early for work every day since I started this job and, barring typhoons and earthquakes, aim to continue to do so until I leave. I would liken this job, for me anyway, to making a presentation at the front of a class in University on something you really, really enjoy talking about for about 3-7 hours each day. Management wise, it's about the same level as that at Silver City, as far as I can tell.

Speaking of my school, here's the website for my specific school: GEOS Musashi-Koganei School. As you can see there's a picture of me and one of my students on the front page. The profiles should be updated (third tab at the top) but they aren't. I'll talk to my manager about it tomorrow.

Q: Do you find Tokyo much more accessible now then when you first arrived?

A: Yes. Especially since I have a cellphone now. I was a lot more worried about going around being unable to contact anyone if I needed a hand with something. Not so now, to Kayoko's eternal annoyance. Also, my cellphone has a utility that can chart a path from your train station to any other one in Japan, including trip time, last train and so forth. Very cool. I've always had a good sense of direction, so finding my way to things isn't too hard once I'm in the right city and on foot.

Q: Where are you buying books?

A: There's two English book stores I've been to now. One is Kinokuniya, in Shinjuku. It's about 5 mintues away from the station. I'll be buying guide books for Europe there around Christmas. The other I found is Tower Records in Shibuya. The top floor of the building is an English book store. Very cool. I even found Lovecraft there, which was difficult to find in Chapters!

Q: How's the attitude towards you as a foreigner?

A: Interesting. I think the most common thing that happens to me is that I catch people taking huge double takes, especially when I step off an elevator or something. Otherwise I haven't had too many troubles. There's a Circle K near my school where the employees are used to the English teachers showing up from my school. They're very helpful. I get the wide-eyed stare from kids everywhere I go. I haven't really had any negative reactions so far, although I'm sure those will happen. Drunk people in clubs seem happy enough to bounce around with me even though I dance like a lunatic. People haven't been overly helpful either. I do feel really bad when I inconvenience a store employee by not being able to speak their language. I'm sure things are much different for my compatriots outside of Tokyo and other cities with a large western population.

Q: How different are our two societies?

A: I won't know that for quite some time. I have an idea now, but I'd rather not put it to kilobytes yet.

And that's it for questions for now. 2 months! It's passed in the blink of an eye... To finish this post I'll just say that I think I might buy a hibiscus tomorrow in order to green up my apartment a little. We'll see. Maybe a small cactus too.

See you all next Tuesday!

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello