On to Work!
Training was done. It was time to start work as a teacher. It would also be one of the last time I would see the view from my hotel. Not that the view from my hotel was great, but it was the only view I really knew other than the training rooms.
Luckily AEON lets you ease into your first two days of classes. Tuesday I taught one and Wednesday I taught two. Instead I was mostly an observer. Training had shown us who the AEON model was. What I saw was very different. The lessons did not have nearly the same scripted feel. I was both happy to see that my school encouraged more freedom, and a bit intimidated by the prospect of living up to what I needed to do.
More than anything else though, the first couple of days gave me a great chance to meet my co-workers. The two other Americans I would work with were Steve and Moss. I already mentioned Moss as the guy who led me around the Sakae district and made sure I could make it to the Sakae branch school. Steve is from California, and a very cool guy. You will hear much more about both of these guys in later entries. Amy was the outgoing teacher I was replacing.
Observing lessons from these three gave me very different angles on teaching. Amy was much more by the book, and very very low key. The lessons seemed good on the technical side, but overall were not exciting and did not engage the students as much as others.
Moss also gave low key lessons. However, his lessons were very inventive and he was very good at getting the students involved in his style. Moss also plays a much more active role in the classroom. Moving around, pointing to things, just generally keeping student attention. The only problem for Moss is he tends to run over time on most lessons, which can make it very exciting to watch the tear down and setup for the next lesson.
Steve was probably the golden boy of the foreign teachers. Steve had his routine down, was very dynamic, and even as a native speaker I found the lessons of his I watched very fun. There was only one partial downside to this, but that is for a much later and much more humorous story. After watching just one lesson from Steve I knew who the benchmark was and the lesson style I wanted to be closest to in my own work.
I also got my first real introductions to and observed some lesson work from the Japanese staff (Kanoko, Kayoko, and Hideki). But they deserve their own post. I also had a few meetings with Manager (Kubota-san) and Yamaguchi-san our assistant manager. Those were mostly informational went over materials required by the company to ensure every teacher knows the basics of policy and procedure at their school.
After those first two-three days though, life became much more interesting. I actually had to take over as a full time teacher…
[...] on January 13, 2008 – 5:49 pm – My last post about my Adventures in Japan left off as I was just starting to work at my branch school. This will be a fun and maybe quirky summary of my first month as a [...]