And Sometimes Why

Tag: 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!

  • Japan, Day 1

    The past two weeks have been a whirlwind. Since the first job offer to the time I landed in Japan was fifteen days, which I spent almost entirely packing.

    You might ask “if you knew you were going to move to Japan, why weren’t you packing anyway, even before you got the official job offer?” Well, every time I spoke with a school or visited a job board, I specified that I would need about 30 days to get ready- plenty of time to pack a 1400 square foot home. I was so excited to get the job offer from ALS, the school I actually *wanted* to get into, that I took the position, even though they wanted me to start in just over a week from the initial job offer.

    Moving, of course, is always a pain in the ass. My last two moves were both to spaces that could absorb everything I had, so I didn’t really need to get rid of anything. In the last few days though, I ended up spending some time packing that I’d normally be sleeping, and consequently got about six hours of sleep in the last two nights before I left. I didn’t even have an opportunity to go get the playing cards I wanted to give as small gifts to students and teachers at ALS. I’m so thankful I built an “extra” 24 hours into my move schedule, as it allowed me to do mop up of things I forgot to take care of before then. Canceling my utilities and services, for instance, and spending an additional six hours at my house so my mom could pack up things that interested her that I was ready to just toss as trash (a lot of food from my pantry, for instance).

    After convincing ALS that starting the week after they initially wanted me would be at least as good (really, is eleven days enough to pack a house and move to a foreign country?), my start date was pushed back by a week. Effectively a little less than that though, as they then told me that I should arrive in Tokyo three or four days before training started, so I could acclimate, decompress, and play tourist a little before my class started on Tuesday. At any rate, my last few days were totally consumed by packing, to say nothing of the panicked couple of hours I spent at the very last moment (early early in the morning of the 11th) unpacking, redistributing, and repacking to keep my big bag under 50 pounds. It’s a great suitcase, but it’s a bit heavy by itself, so I need to be more careful about using it on flights with a weight limit. It ended up at 53.5 pounds, but the nice lady at the check in counter didn’t make me pay the $50 to have a bag in the 50-75 lb range (thank god it wasn’t $100 for the 75-100 lb range).

    I had the forethought to put all liquids in my checked bag, so I didn’t have to deal with that fiasco again (ask me about the Helena airport screening sometime). I squeezed my Wii and controllers into some spaces between clothes in my carryon bag (I had originally planned to pad it with the clothes in the big bag, but I couldn’t add the weight). Without my knee brace, I breezed right through security in Las Vegas.

    The flight from Las Vegas to LA was uneventful. To pass the 1.5-hour layover I struck up a conversation with a Korean accountant who was waiting to fly home (whose sister, coincidentally, used to own an English language school).

    The flight from LA to Tokyo was quite long. It seemed much longer than any of the transoceanic flights I’ve flown previously, probably because the in-flight entertainment system was malfunctioning. It only worked for a few minutes at a time, then the system would show static and a message saying the channel was no longer available (which only lasted about a second at a time, but it forced you to change back to your chosen movie or TV show after it reset). At any rate, I have to say the in-flight entertainment system on Japan Airlines is much better than American Airlines. Though they both have individual seat-back monitors, JAL’s system offers true On-Demand programming, where American Airlines had a two-hour (2.5?) block of programming on thirteen channels that looped throughout the flight.

    I was met at Narita airport by an ALS teacher named Chris. Chris is 27, originally from Long Island, and has a degree in psychology. He’s been with ALS for a while now, and helped me get the perspective of someone that actually works in the trenches. Everything he told me jived with what the recruiter said, so I felt pretty good about my decision to join ALS. He also mentioned that he was moving in next door to the guest house, and should I need anything, to feel free to ask. We rode the JR East train from Narita to Yotsukaido, which turned out to be a bit further from central Tokyo than I thought (the fact that we had to take a train instead of a subway might have tipped you off).

    Here are my four bags on the floor of the train. Even though you can see the orange “Heavy” tag on my big green bag, it was only about two thirds full- but still, all four bags together weighed about 135 pounds. The problem with this became very apparent when we arrived in Yotsukaido and I had to carry my laptop, blue backpack, and overstuffed garment bag from the station to the guest house, almost half a mile away. I seriously felt like I was plucked out of a cartoon, wearing the backpack with the garment bag looped over one shoulder and the laptop bag over the other. Chris walked next to me, and we tried to talk over the din of my 53 lb suitcase’s plastic wheels negotiating the rough asphalt road. We certainly weren’t travelling covertly, that’s for sure.

    I was pleasantly surprised by the guest house itself. It has five bedrooms- four upstairs, and mine downstairs. Yes, like all of the homes in Japan, you do need to take off your shoes when you come inside. Just next to the front door is a cabinet to store your shoes and a long shoehorn to help you back into them when you need it.

    The living room, kitchen, and dining areas are one large room. When I looked around, I was pleasantly surprised again- one of my housemates brought his Nintendo Wii, and was playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl. The kitchen is modestly sized, and generally exactly what you’d expect, except for the undersized refrigerator (undersized to my American preconceptions, anyway) and the built-in oven that’s almost the exact same size as a toaster oven. In fact, the only advantage it has over a toaster oven is that it doesn’t use up valuable counter space. The only internet connection in the building is through the one ethernet cable on the desk in the living room, where I’m sitting right now. Also on the desk is a crazy rotary pay phone. It costs Â¥10 for each 30 second increment of local calls, so people generally use it just long enough to tell someone to call them back.

    My room is about the size of a single dorm room. I have a sliding door that affords me an excellent view of the not so excellent rear cinderblock wall and the rear of the neighbors’ house. The bed is a standard bed frame, but uses a futon mattress and pad. The downstairs toilet room is just outside my bedroom, and the shower/laundry room is five steps further. All things considered, I’m completely satisfied with the digs.

    After I put my bags down, Jonathan stopped playing his Wii and joined Chris and I on our walk to Ito Yokado, a department store about a quarter mile away from the guest house. It’s a three (?) story standalone affair with its own internal food court and supermarket, and is a great place to shop for just about anything you need. We each grabbed a pre-wrapped item or two from some waist-high open-top refrigerated cases, and brought them back to the house to eat and talk.

    It’s funny what happens to your concept of “reasonable walking distance” in a situation like this. I’ve walked to Ito Yokado at least once a day since I’ve been here, and I was still shocked when I figured out the distance using Google Maps. It really doesn’t seem far from the house at all, just a few blocks. I imagine this’ll get me in slightly better cardio shape, at the very least. 🙂

    All in all, I’m very happy with my decision to pursue ALS the way I did. Everyone I’ve met from the company seems very friendly and knowledgeable. I’ll have a lot more to say about that in the days to come, as I get into my actual training, I’m sure.

    Signing off,
    David