And Sometimes Why

Category: Yotsukaido

  • ALS Training

    Another long post ahead. Maybe I’m making up for lost time. Maybe I’m just long-winded. =)

    ALS new teacher training runs five days. As we were hired at about the same time, I was joined in training by Jonathan Nusbaum, an American teacher already in Japan hired away from Margaret’s English School. Day one (Tuesday, April 15th) was all paperwork and introduction to the company, its history, and its major players, as described and facilitated by HR Director Marie Verlingo, who walked Jonathan and me through all the paperwork and helped us wade through the sea of new names. That took place in the ALS head office in Chiba. Here’s a picture of the room in which I spent the day.

    As you can see, I used my laptop to take notes- nine pages over four days, in fact.

    Day two was in Yotsukaido, the Tokyo suburb where the company guest house is located, this time facilitated by Jack Stearn. Jack Stearn, for those of you who haven’t met him, is an incredible children’s educator. He doesn’t quite have enough notoriety to have a Wikipedia page yet, but he certainly deserves one. Originally from the northwestern US, he’s been teaching English as a Foreign Language in Japan for twenty years, and it shows. His lesson plans are beautifully crafted pieces of art, and his command of children’s psychology should earn him an honorary doctorate. He’s the teacher with the most tenure at ALS, and seems to have a finger in a few other pieces of the business as well. As you may have guessed, we talked about teaching theory, specifically as it applies to children. We also covered lesson planning and why it’s important. Here are a couple pictures of the ALS head office, by the way:

    Starting from the left, there’s Junya Sasaki, the company’s accountant, and a friend of the company’s owner, Mr. Saito. Hired to clean house, Junya (as he prefers to be called) replaced two (three?) other full-time accountants, and works long hours to prove it. Unfortunately, I’m not sure of the woman’s name across from him, but I think it’s Sachiko, who handles internal logistics and travel. The eyes just peeking over the copier belong to Jon Clark. Jon is another excellent educator, though he doesn’t have quite the same tenure as Jack. He’s Canadian, though I promised not to hold it against him, as are Marie and Dominique. Jon’s forte is slightly older children, though I’d be hard pressed to find any student he couldn’t teach to write a treatise on War & Peace if he had a few weeks to devote.

    Standing to Jon’s left is the aforementioned Mr. Stearn. Though I’m not entirely sure, I think Yoko Uekusa is the one closely studying the papers on the desk in front of her. In the back wearing the white shirt and short hair is Marie Verlingo. Marie is the one I spoke with on the phone for my second interview, the one that gave me the official “hire” decision. To the far right side of the frame, head in mid-spin, is Dominique Parker. Dominique is the one I spoke with on the phone for my initial interview. Marie and Dominique are both Canadian, which means almost half of the people that work in the American Language School head office are Canadian. Canadia is part of America too, so that’s okay.

    Day three was also in Yotsukaido. The morning session was with Junko Yoshimoto, and focused on the *really* young children, aged three through five. ALS has an interesting program for kids that young. They call it the “Rhythmic Program,” and it basically consists of playing with the kids in English and singing songs in English, with maybe some repetition of basic English sounds. This happens in small groups with the parents and a Japanese teacher present, in a team-teach setup. I don’t know how much those “classes” cost, but they can’t be cheap. After lunch, Junko stepped out and Jon stepped in.

    I’m going to stop my dry narrative here for a minute to let you in my head a little bit. Like I mentioned before, Jack is a seriously good teacher- intimidatingly so, in fact. Monday and Tuesday nights I was sent home with a video of an example lesson to watch (perfectly planned and executed my Misters Clark and Stearn). Add to that the fact that I’m a little afraid I’m going to permanently mess up some random Japanese kid (think “No more wire hangers!” from Mommie Dearest, but in my nightmares it’s me swinging the classroom pointer screaming “That’s an R, not an L! Are you retarded?!”), and you get a palpable amount of stress. What if little Mizuki goes home and tells his parents how the bottom of the instruction level fell out after I came on board? These are real kids in the classroom, not CPR instruction dummies with faces forever frozen in surprise, no matter how many cardiac “massage” beatings they sustain. No, if the children I’ve seen terrorizing Las Vegas businesses for the last two score years are any testament, you can seriously and permanently mess up a child. I hear they’re surprisingly so, but my problem is that I don’t have enough experience to know exactly how resilient kids are.

    Jon Clark took that fear from me and made the job real and doable. He talked me through lesson planning for Junior High kids, and somehow I felt like I could actually do this. I’m not sure if it was his general pragmatism that did it or his simplification of the whole affair of teaching in the first place (“If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong”), but at the end of the day my head was back on straight. Walking out of school that day was seriously one of those slow motion end of the movie moments for me, where the main character is walking away from the camera and you can hear the music swell and you know the credits are about to roll (I’m thinking Breakfast Club, but just about any John Hughes movie will work).

    That night, we had a new arrival at the guest house. Michael Barker arrived from Thailand and moved in upstairs. He was scheduled to arrive on Monday and start training with me on Tuesday, but because he was flying standby at a peak time of the year (national holiday in Thailand), he was unable to get on a plane until Thursday. While I’m talking about Michael’s arrival, I might as well talk about Jonathan’s situation. He was hired to take over for an existing teacher (Deirdre Porter), as we all were. However, as Deirdre had already rather suddenly returned to Canada due to a surprise diagnosis of leukemia, he was not able to attend the second half of each day’s training because he was actually already teaching. (I hear Deirdre’s doing quite well now, by the way.)

    Anyway, I brought my refreshed perspective to day four’s adult lesson planning, and it went quite well. The second half of the day was back in Chiba, and I had to navigate my way there without any help for the first time. Michael and I spent the latter half of the day with Marie back in the original training room talking about a few dry topics, as Marie apologetically pointed out a few times. We went over our transition schedules from training to teaching including transportation from the guest house to our actual teaching assignment, how to be a good employee, and signed our actual ALS contracts.

    The last day of training was entirely observation of an established teacher in action. As my franchise owner had requested, I was in the classroom with Jack all day. This turned out to be a blessing and a curse, as Jack’s schedule was almost entirely comprised of lessons for young kids, with one private adult lesson at the end of the day. Not awful, but not wholly representative of my eventual solo teaching situation.

    I felt like we should have some sort of celebration on Saturday night to celebrate the end of training, but Jonathan was already moving into his new apartment in the neighborhood (his assignment was based in Yotsukaido) and Michael was doing his own thing, so I was left to pack on my own and wonder if I was going to make it from Yotsukaido to Matsuyama without adult supervision.

    I read and re-read this set of directions, hoping nothing went wrong along the way while I caught two trains, a monorail, a plane, and a bus to get to Matsuyama Station. Wish me luck!

  • Exploring Yotsukaido

    I know I promised a blog entry over a week ago, but I didn’t anticipate how hard it would be for me to get an internet connection. More on that later; for now, let it suffice that I say it’s a pain. Also, long post ahead. I think you should just expect those from now on. 🙂

    Let me start with a followup from my mention of the trash system from last time. At the ALS guest house in Yotsukaido, there are five refuse bins. The “kitchen”/organic/burnable garbage *must* be in a special yellow garbage bag. The other four bins are plastic (except bottles), plastic bottles, cans, and I believe the last one is paper.

     

    Here are the bins and the poster describing the exact details of how you’re supposed to handle different types of trash.

    I heard a rumor that they actually need the separate categories not for recycling, but to determine the temperature of the furnace in which the trash is burned, which supposedly explains why the greater Tokyo metropolitan area is so dusty. I sincerely hope they’re recycling it all and not burning it. Enough trash talk, though. (Ha!)

    On Sunday, April 14th, Justin Ekins and his wife Misato Morita came out to visit me from Tokyo (Koto City, to be exact). We ate a great pasta lunch at a tiny Italian restaurant on the second floor of a building next to the Yotsukaido station. Here’s a picture of the three of us at lunch.


    Then I showed them back to the guest house and walked them over to Ito Yokado, a department store chain in Japan. The parent company is “7+i Holdings”, and if you’re an American looking at the logo, you’ll probably know exactly where the seven comes from.


    7+i logo

    In case you’re not American or it’s not as clear as I thought, it’s from the “7” in the convenience store name “7-11”. Yes, 7-11 runs a chain of successful department stores in Japan. No, it’s nothing like 7-11 in the states. They sell everything from groceries to house wares to electronics to kimonos, and actually have an indoor playground in the children’s section that includes a balloon pit instead of a ball pit, which I thought was a neat idea.


    Here are a couple of pictures of the walk from the guest house to Ito Yokado. The cherry blossoms had just fallen a few days before, and you can see them collecting in drifts along the path. Here’s a shot of the balloon pit.

    While we were at Ito Yokado, Justin and Misato helped me order my hanko. A hanko, as I found out over lunch, is a rubber stamp with a cylindrical handle and the owner’s name written in kanji (or katakana, as the case may be) enclosed in a round circle about one centimeter in diameter, always used with red ink. They’re used in Japan in place of a handwritten signature for everything from initialing the employee bathroom cleaning schedule to signing for packages to signatures on legal documents. Justin had some criticisms of the hanko system, and while I could tell that Misato didn’t really disagree with his point of view, she seemed a little more willing to work with the system as it is. She mentioned that some people use knives to purposely put premature wear marks on their hanko to specifically identify them in case there’s ever a dispute over the legality of a “signature”. I suppose that’s about as hard to fake as a handwritten signature elsewhere, but that still doesn’t prevent someone from stealing the physical stamp.


    Here’s a shot of my hanko (and free plastic case, replete with red ink pad!). It says “Heddo” written vertically. That’s as close as Japanese gets to my last name.

    The next day I spent leisurely wandering around Yotsukaido. While walking around, I spotted someone’s answer to Japan’s dearth of parking spaces. It’s the only one I’ve seen in a private driveway (they’re common in parking lots), and I imagine it’s rather expensive, but I suppose your own parking elevator does double the size of your single-car driveway.


    I spent a few hours walking, and while I didn’t know specifically where I was, I wasn’t truly “lost,” as I always felt like I could retrace my steps to get home without difficulty. I ended up walking in a big clockwise circuit around “downtown” Yotsukaido. I use quotes because it’s kind of like saying “downtown Boulder City.” Yes, it’s the center of the local economy, but is it really “downtown”? I really don’t know if anyone will be interested, but while walking around, I spotted a Nissan Stagea (it’s a wagon version of the Skyline, if you know what that is).


    Anyway, it was one of those beautifully overcast days, where nothing has a shadow. A very fine rain began falling as I got back to the house, and I opened the sliding door onto the deck, sat in the living room, and ate the lunch I’d bought from a local bakery while watching the traffic pass by. It was one of those truly refreshing moments of solitude, where you feel the tension just drain from your body.

    Japan seems to be infatuated with bakeries. They all have variations on a few main themes (standard doughnuts and danishes, hot dog-based breads, prefab sandwiches made from mini-loaves stuffed with sandwich fillings), as well as items unique to each bakery. You have to watch out though, if you don’t like corn or egg salad, because they’ll try and sneak it in there if you’re not expecting it. Seriously, who wants an egg salad sandwich with corn kernels sprinkled on top? Anyway, 90% of the stuff they sell is pretty good, in my humble opinion.

    Something else Japan has a lot of is bicycles. Seriously, the country is supersaturated. Near the train station in Yotsukaido, there’s a two-story bicycle parking garage. No joke. I think they use monthly parking decals on the fenders to identify the bikes allowed to park there. But apparently that wasn’t enough space though, because there’s a three story bicycle parking garage right next door. In case you think I’m making this up, here’s a photograph of the two garages, right next to each other.


    And in case you don’t believe the light grey building in the background is actually another bicycle parking garage, here’s a shot from inside the second story. Note that each story of the building actually has two levels of bikes, placed and retrieved by the use of ramps that pull out for each bike.

    I think that’s it for this entry. Next time, I promise to get to the actual ALS training. I leave you with a snapshot of myself dressed for the first day of training.


    さよなら,

    – ヘッド