(no subject)
So, it took me all of, like, 30 seconds to slack off on this thing. My bad. The flipside of that is, I've been quite busy, and haven't really been wanting to devote my time to writing this thing -- although that's bad, because this journal is as much for me as to provide something for other people to read.
I'm approaching the 3-month marker, which puts me already a quarter of the way through my year, which is nuts to think about. On Monday the 29th, I have to go back to Omiya for follow-up training, which is fully expected to suck in all respects other than the fact that I get to see my training crew again. Makes for, again, a busy weekend, as it eats one of my two days.
We're heading into a period of frustratingly large staff turnover at my school -- one of the foreign teachers, Judy, had her last day yesterday, so we're going to have a temp in for a couple of weeks before we get our new permanent replacement sometime in December. Also, our old head teacher is stepping down to be a regular part-time teacher for a short while before leaving soon, because she's pregnant. This is okay, as the old HT, while an extremely sweet and well-intentioned woman, was rather incompetent. Her replacement has been a part-timer at my school since the summer, and I expect that she'll do an excellent job once she settles in, but I'm predicting a rocky transition because this new HT has been working for the company for about two months longer than I have.
One kind of nice (temporary) repercussion of this is that the temp who's coming in is a Japanese teacher, not a foreign teacher. Because of htis, there's been schedule shifting, because the Japanese teachers don't teach the very high-level classes (just as the foreign teachers don't teach the very low-level classes). So I've lost a chunk of my low-level classes and picked up some more high-level ones, which is good because I can joke around in high-level classes. I can't joke around as much in low-level classes because their language isn't good enough to get the humour.
Other news. . . I visited Kamakura last weekend and saw a bunch of shrines and temples, which is always beautiful. November is a popular month to go to shrines in Japan, because of "shichi-go-san" (seven-five-three). In November (specifically, the 15th, but people generally just aim for the month) parents are supposed to bring their five-year-old sons and their three- and seven-year-old daughters to shrine to pray for their good health. The Shinto and Buddhist traditions here are really interesting. Virtually nobody actually believes in them, but most people still follow the traditions anyway, for cultural preservation purposes. The shrines and temples are really beautiful, peaceful places to sit, especially if you step away from the big famous ones and stick to the smaller, local spaces. I've spent a bit of time just sitting at a couple of the temples near my apartment. I visited the Meiji shrine a few weeks ago, which is massive and grand on the edge of Yoyogi park. Yoyogi park is another experience in itself -- it's the hippy locale of the city, from my experience, and has some of the wildest street performance I've ever seen, including the Tokyo rockabilly club (I've never seen so many pompadours in one place), some of the coolest stunt-biking I've ever seen, and this guy whose miniature terrier pushes itself around on a skateboard. there was this one guy I saw this summer who was dressed head to toe in black, with a black hood with a hole for his face. This, in itself, would have been impressive, as this was back when the temperature was still sitting at 40 degrees with about a thousand percent humidity. But he had a stereo slung over his shoulder that was blasting bad trance music, and he was dancing madly to it in place, and while he was doing this he was working on this sketch set up on an easel in front of him, and it was actually quite a cool sketch. But it was just wild. I mean, he must have been drugged up on something; there's no other way anybody could have endured that kind of frenetic activity in those hot clothes in that heat.
Oh, and then there are the Sunday costumes on the bridge at Harajuku. Those cannot be described. I'll have to go back and take a picture.
I'm not really sure if there's much else to say. I've been busy hanging with friends here (after a bit of a slow start, I've finally set up a social life) and working on grad school applications for the fall. School is going well -- I've finally settled in, really; I like my students a lot, I get along with the staff, it's cool. We're a less warm-and-cozy branch than most of the others I've heard about, but I don't mind that, as we also don't have a lot of the associated problems of having students become rather fixated with their foreign English teachers. I've really only got one student who's schizo, and she's schizo in a pretty harmless way, I think. Annoying, not threatening.
So, uh, yeah, that's it. Can't shake this stupid killer cough I've got. I'm goign to go home now and take a bath and drink mint tea and attempt not to succumb to the threat of spontaneous human combustion (with stress markers). (Don't ask about that last one.)
I'm approaching the 3-month marker, which puts me already a quarter of the way through my year, which is nuts to think about. On Monday the 29th, I have to go back to Omiya for follow-up training, which is fully expected to suck in all respects other than the fact that I get to see my training crew again. Makes for, again, a busy weekend, as it eats one of my two days.
We're heading into a period of frustratingly large staff turnover at my school -- one of the foreign teachers, Judy, had her last day yesterday, so we're going to have a temp in for a couple of weeks before we get our new permanent replacement sometime in December. Also, our old head teacher is stepping down to be a regular part-time teacher for a short while before leaving soon, because she's pregnant. This is okay, as the old HT, while an extremely sweet and well-intentioned woman, was rather incompetent. Her replacement has been a part-timer at my school since the summer, and I expect that she'll do an excellent job once she settles in, but I'm predicting a rocky transition because this new HT has been working for the company for about two months longer than I have.
One kind of nice (temporary) repercussion of this is that the temp who's coming in is a Japanese teacher, not a foreign teacher. Because of htis, there's been schedule shifting, because the Japanese teachers don't teach the very high-level classes (just as the foreign teachers don't teach the very low-level classes). So I've lost a chunk of my low-level classes and picked up some more high-level ones, which is good because I can joke around in high-level classes. I can't joke around as much in low-level classes because their language isn't good enough to get the humour.
Other news. . . I visited Kamakura last weekend and saw a bunch of shrines and temples, which is always beautiful. November is a popular month to go to shrines in Japan, because of "shichi-go-san" (seven-five-three). In November (specifically, the 15th, but people generally just aim for the month) parents are supposed to bring their five-year-old sons and their three- and seven-year-old daughters to shrine to pray for their good health. The Shinto and Buddhist traditions here are really interesting. Virtually nobody actually believes in them, but most people still follow the traditions anyway, for cultural preservation purposes. The shrines and temples are really beautiful, peaceful places to sit, especially if you step away from the big famous ones and stick to the smaller, local spaces. I've spent a bit of time just sitting at a couple of the temples near my apartment. I visited the Meiji shrine a few weeks ago, which is massive and grand on the edge of Yoyogi park. Yoyogi park is another experience in itself -- it's the hippy locale of the city, from my experience, and has some of the wildest street performance I've ever seen, including the Tokyo rockabilly club (I've never seen so many pompadours in one place), some of the coolest stunt-biking I've ever seen, and this guy whose miniature terrier pushes itself around on a skateboard. there was this one guy I saw this summer who was dressed head to toe in black, with a black hood with a hole for his face. This, in itself, would have been impressive, as this was back when the temperature was still sitting at 40 degrees with about a thousand percent humidity. But he had a stereo slung over his shoulder that was blasting bad trance music, and he was dancing madly to it in place, and while he was doing this he was working on this sketch set up on an easel in front of him, and it was actually quite a cool sketch. But it was just wild. I mean, he must have been drugged up on something; there's no other way anybody could have endured that kind of frenetic activity in those hot clothes in that heat.
Oh, and then there are the Sunday costumes on the bridge at Harajuku. Those cannot be described. I'll have to go back and take a picture.
I'm not really sure if there's much else to say. I've been busy hanging with friends here (after a bit of a slow start, I've finally set up a social life) and working on grad school applications for the fall. School is going well -- I've finally settled in, really; I like my students a lot, I get along with the staff, it's cool. We're a less warm-and-cozy branch than most of the others I've heard about, but I don't mind that, as we also don't have a lot of the associated problems of having students become rather fixated with their foreign English teachers. I've really only got one student who's schizo, and she's schizo in a pretty harmless way, I think. Annoying, not threatening.
So, uh, yeah, that's it. Can't shake this stupid killer cough I've got. I'm goign to go home now and take a bath and drink mint tea and attempt not to succumb to the threat of spontaneous human combustion (with stress markers). (Don't ask about that last one.)