Sequoia Wild

Just a quick post to say that teaching has now become doable. It is no longer eating my every waking hour and giving me nightmares. I ride my new folding bike to school, prep in the space between classes, teach increasingly better, then ride home and do my ‘real’ life. So the crazy time has passed and I am spending a lot of time focusing on my novel and other awesome projects that I will mention in a later post.

Today I feel proud of myself, accomplished and competent! This weekend I made myself relax and not prep, as I had prepping burn out and wasn’t really retaining anything. So after deciding to prep in a general sense, and use the little pauses in class to insto-prep, my classes were all successful, I didn’t make my bosses nervous by seeming unsure about the schedule, and I taught the best I have so far. So yay for relaxing! And tonight I didn’t bring home the books to prep with at all. Now I get dinner and am going to watch something. Only down thing was battling ants when I got home- apparently you have to have covered garbage cans, so shopping time! And I was able to scare the ants away with incense and rubbing lavender deodorant all over their tracks, so my hippie sensibilities are intact. bbye!

I am so overwhelmed that I don’t know where to start. I forgot how much the learning curve of a new teaching job sucks the life out of me. I begin to forget that I am anything but a teacher, and have any responsibilities or rights outside of being a teacher. I have 28 classes a week with over 75 students across 11 different curricula (4 main categories). Each of the 4 categories of curricula has a specific formula for delivering content, rituals for each transition in class, and even verbal patterns that the kids depend on for knowing what is expected. I learned in my first kids’ class that they literally only know the vocabulary, sentence patterns and instructions that they have been taught before: the difference between an ESL environment (where English is spoken around them outside of class) and the EFL environment that is Japan. I had understood this intellectually during my training, but the impact on the classroom environment is staggering. So much of what I do to entertain my native English students in my previous schools just confuse the poor students here. And I am learning quickly that “sit down” will always result in them sitting, while “have a seat” makes them all look at me funny. (more…)