au debut

The last few weeks I have been sitting in the teacher's office, working on lessons (in theory) and studying teaching methods. A lot of time was spent writing emails, meeting other teachers, and reading about 800 articles about painting and color. Anyhow, summer "vacation" is over, and teaching has begun!

Today i started with my first french lessons. I am teaching English at Usuki high school and French and English at a high school near Oita city. My first classes were in French, very fun! I wrote the lessons at Usuki high school and mailed them to myself, so I could access them on the computer at Higashi Koko to download, print, and deliver! I got to school at 8:30 .. I believe 3 weeks ago I was told that my first day was on Tuesday. Much to my surprise, they informed me that my first class was in 45 minutes, which is incindentally how long it takes to boot up the dinosaur of a computer in the teacher's room. I finally got it started .. and the internet wouldn't work. 30 minutes before class started, with a mountain of accumulated paper and mail on my desk, I had to rewrite the lessons from memory! My head was kind of in a whirl. 9:30 rolled around, I went to the class .. and it was wonderful! My first class was 11th grade, only 4 students. The second class was 12th grade with 6 students. I love the small class sizes -- I can interact with every student every day. I am really going to enjoy the year. No matter how difficult it may seem, I am doing the class in French immersion! I believe that language learning can be delivered completely in the target language, and that it is potentially best for the student to be in that environment. So .. let's do this.

Last week, I did a brief self-introduction to all of the students of Usuki High School. A little two minute speech in Japanese in an assembly type setting. It went well, but my Japanese is definitely pretty rough. After that, I went straight to my first English class. I had a 20 minute self-introduction about myself -- family, hobbies, life in Japan. I thought it went pretty well. After the class, a group of boys came up to me and said thank you. I felt pretty grateful to be here! Until one of the more reambunctious ones asked me the next question "So .. Josh-sensei, how many woman do you associate?" which I think is a poorly translated version of how many women I have been with. I said "uhhh" and disappeared down the hallway. If that is the first comment after the first class, this will be an interesting year!