Welcome to Training!
Just when you think wandering around a city with your friends is fun, guess what happens? They put you to work. Indeed, all good things must come to an end. In this case, things came to a screeching halt of freetime and a new beginning for 10-12 hour workdays.
That being said, the actual time spent in the training office was not required to be 10-12 hours. Training was really only 8 hours each day for the week. But, when you add on lessons you have to prepare to teach and various “fun” tests on your reading of the training materials; you end up spending much more time at the office. And actually, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it sounds.
We did training for corporate information, round-up lessons (small group lessons), group lessons, private lessons, student counseling, and other misc. sorts of stuff. And every day you dress up in your suit and soldier on over to work, despite living in a hotel and having no real laundry service or ability. And no income… You get paid very decently for training, but you have to wait until your first real payday at your branch school. So it might be close to a month to get that payout, but that is why they make sure to remind you repeatedly that you will need cash for that first week. You also have no kitchen… And that’s where the fun begins.
Food in Japan is not incredibly cheap. Hot food, at least, is not incredibly cheap. Luckily for starving trainees there is a solution. Japan has an abundance of convenience stores. These nice little places like 7-11, Lawsons, Mini Stop, and many others cater to the “I have no god damn time and need something to eat really cheap” crowd. And you can get lots of really cheap food that will probably kill you sooner than later. The other thing I encountered during these forays into the low cost food world was that I still do not have the ability to read anything in Japanese. Therefore, picking food can be… hmmm… interesting. Just because it happens to be sitting next to donuts and looks like it could be an attempt at the Bear Claw, does not mean it is. No, the Bear Claw-esque food I chose to pickup happened to be tuna & mayonnaise on bread. It had also been on a self without any cooling for, lets call it, a mysterious amount of time. Needless to say, my craving for breakfast that morning was quickly killed.
Luckily this did not stop me from delivering perfectly timed sample lessons in training. Notice the words error free were not in that statement. I am now a true master of the 50 minute lesson, truly, by god, your lesson will be 50 minutes. If you want a perfectly formulated lesson, you should probably ask a real teacher. The students were happy with the lessons I gave though. They left happy and entertained, which is really the goal of our lessons. I will explain the goals of AEON teaching in a later post. In the meantime, my ability to get the lesson format correct and teach quality lessons did improve dramatically over time.
Next time: Getting to your branch school
