Teaching
I finally started teaching! It has been about three weeks since I became "Emi-Sensei." Since Emi is my Japanese name and what I am used to hearing at home or from close friends, I asked them to call me Emi instead of Emily.
I go to the one middle school in my town on Mondays and rotate through four very small elementary schools the rest of the days. I always teach 5th and 6th grade in elementary school, as well as one other younger class. I rotate through 1st and 4th grade every few weeks. For every school, I eat lunch with the students.
I am not going to put the actual schools' names since it might be inappropriate to publicize what I like and dislike about certain schools. As such, I will number them. Here is what my schools are like:
Monday: Middle School
This is my only middle school. There are three grades, 7-9 and two or three classes per grade with around 30 students in a single class. The teachers here speak good English and are all about team-teaching. Usually they prepare the lesson plans, which is different a little from the elementary schools. We always start class with a greeting: Hello! How are you? and they usually respond something along the lines of "I'm fine," "I'm hungry," "I'm tired." Then we go through the day of the week, date, and weather. The date is difficult because Japanese is pretty intuitive. For instance, the word for September is literally "nine month" and the day for the 24th is "24 day." English also has weird numbers, such as twelve or fourteen. In Japanese, the corresponding words are literally translated to "ten-two" and "ten-four." My dad actually sent me an article about how non-English speaking countries tend to have higher math scores because of the language difference. In English, students not only have to think about solving a math-problem, but memorizing the different numbers, which are less intuitive than languages such as Turkish, Japanese, Chinese, etc.
Tuesday: Elementary School 1
I have yet to teach at this school! I did my self-introduction to the whole student body (a whopping 36 students) on the first day. Since then there has been a town elementary school track meet and two holidays falling on Tuesday, so I don't have much to report here.
Wednesday: Elementary School 2
This is my biggest elementary school, which has 96 students. The teachers here usually prepare a lesson plan following the textbook. We discuss it beforehand and I tell them when the textbook is using English that doesn't really make sense. For instance, there was a map and it said "Turn right, go straight, turn left, what is it?" instead of saying something like "Turn right, go straight, what is on your left?" Or a more blatant example of an awkward English conversation: "Hi Tomoe, I like apples. I like lemons. Do you like soccer?" "Hi Haruki, no, I don't. I don't like soccer. I like peaches. Do you like swimming." "I like swimming. Do you like grapes." Instead, we might say something like "Hi Tomoe. Do you like lemons?" "No, I don't like lemons, but I do like apples. What sports do you like?"
The actual lessons consist of reviewing vocabulary, learning new phrases, and doing some sort of fun activity to practice the activity. Since the 6th graders are a little more shy about speaking English and are also quite rambunctious, I have had an easier time with the 5th graders.
Thursday: Elementary School 3
Super energetic. 32 students in the ENTIRE school. My fifth grade class has 9 students and my sixth grade class has 2 students. TWO! The teachers usually e-mail me about where we are in the textbook and what textbook activity they want to include. I prepare the rest of the lesson. I wanted to keep some continuity with my predecessor so I do an ABC warm-up like she used to have, usually followed by vocabulary review, then introduction of the new phrase which we practice with a game, and then some final activity. I also taught 3rd and 4th grade, mostly reviewing the ABCs. This one student in my class is hilarious, although all of the students are cute and funny in general. He asked me in Japanese, "Emi-sensei, do you know Big Ben? It's in England." I said yes I do. And he replied, "Okay" and that was that. Another student at Elementary School 2 asked me in Japanese "How many times do you get a cold in a year?" just out of pure curiosity. I was also asked which I like more, money or my boyfriend. HA! Little kids are so funny.
Friday: Elementary School 4
38 students in the school. 4 fifth graders and 5 sixth graders. Not energetic AT ALL. I was so surprised the first time I went there! All of my other elementary schoolers are so excited and this bunch just stared at me and groaned whenever I asked them something simple like, "How old are you?" The 6th grade teacher also blurts out the answer when I ask something before the students can even think! Apparently my predecessor had the same problem, but luckily one of the students would tell him not to say it so that they could try. The 5th grade teacher is great and really fun to work with. The first time we taught together we had a friendly collision of ideas since we both prepared things, but wanted to incorporate the other's ideas. Last class we figured things out and it went pretty smoothly. We'll start team-teaching the 3rd and 4th graders every week until December, so I'm looking forward to that. The sixth graders also loosened up a bit and were much better this past Friday about speaking up and being cooperative.
All in all, I like teaching so far!