If you’ve known me for a while, you know that I can be a little… particular sometimes. I like clean things. I used to be a little obsessive about keeping my hands clean, but I’ve relaxed a lot over the last ten years or so.
A couple years ago, a friend told me that I’d relax my hygiene rules once I had a kid to take care of. You know, kids eat off the floor and stick their hands in the dirtiest… Anyway, Shannon Wood, this story is for you.
Friday afternoon, during a free play period for one of our younger classes (3-4 year olds), I was sitting on the floor between some girls playing with pots and dishes and a group of boys making “guns” out of plastic building blocks. Gender stereotypes aside, I was having fun playing with the kids, my participation going back and forth between the two groups.
This particular classroom has a restroom in the actual classroom, so I didn’t think too much of it when I caught a whiff of something that smelled like dirty diaper, especially because I was only a few feet from the door. As I was sitting there playing for a few minutes though, I was less and less convinced that the smell was coming from the restroom.
I asked the boy on my left if he needed to use the restroom, and he said it was the girl on my right, who also said she didn’t need to use the toilet. Slightly confused, I looked around a little more closely and discovered a small piece of poo on the floor near me about the size of a sunflower seed.
I grabbed a tissue, quickly picked it up, and asked my assistant if she knew what was up. She instantly knew which student it had come from, and took the girl I’d asked earlier into the restroom.
As it turns out, she’d messed her pants but continued playing, and it had worked its way out of her pants.
Hoping to keep the problem as contained as possible, I inspected that whole side of the classroom, but didn’t find any other untouched pieces. I did find one that had been rather effectively spread on the bottom of a plastic doctor kit next to where I was sitting. This disturbed me, because I was not interested in rolling around in some kid’s poo, whether it be on my clothing or skin.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t so lucky. I found a few strong smears along my outer left leg from when I’d been sitting with my legs crossed.
I don’t know exactly what words would describe how I felt. This was my first class of the day, and I had a parents’ observation in a few hours. But really, that was a secondary concern for me right after “I have poo stripes on my pants. I have freaking POO STRIPES on my PANTS.”
But I couldn’t just abandon my class, obviously. So I got out the hand sanitizer and cleaned up the floor as much as I could. I tried to put it out of my mind as much as I could. We had a drawing exercise we did after play time was over. And during a short break after that class, I went home as quickly as I could. (There’s one nice thing about riding a bicycle instead of driving a car- you can stand up to avoid getting poo on the seat should you need to do so.)
Disaster averted, I went back to school with clean pants.
My takeaway lesson is that I can handle the stuff like that that I know I’ll have to deal with around kids, be they mine or someone else’s.
But seriously? If you can avoid it, don’t sit in someone else’s poo.
I know I’ve been a bit of an absent blogger lately. Work’s been kicking my butt, and I’m one of those people who falls into the “if I can’t do it perfectly, then I won’t do it at all” trap sometimes. So to combat that tendency a little bit, I’m going to throw up some information in what I know is a less-than-ideal format. That said, here’s what I’ve been up to recently:
I moved in with Yuko a few months ago. Her parents weren’t thrilled with the idea at first, but they’ve since come around, which brings me to my next point:
I met Yuko’s parents yesterday. They were supposed to come out to Matsuyama around Christmas, but her dad hurt his back. They brought a carload of stuff, including enough food to feed a small militia for a few days. Luckily, Yuko is a fantastic cook, and the veggies her mom brought are all really fresh.
I applied to JET for the 2009-2010 school year, and had to go to Guam in February to interview. This created a tricky timing problem. I had to tell American Language School in April if I was going to renew my contract (set to expire in July), but JET notifies participants through May (and sometimes later) if they’re hired for positions starting in August. I ended up not renewing with ALS but not getting a JET position either, which leads to my next point:
I started working for a different English school here in Matsuyama. I now work for Miki Study Pals (pictured at left), a school that caters to parents who can pay for their kids to become essentially bilingual. Even though the bilingual students only represent about 10% of the students at the school, they have a bit of a “halo effect”, much like the Toyota Prius makes people associate fuel economy with Toyota.
I mentioned that work has been kicking my ass. I’ve been tasked with designing the curriculum for the last three months of the school year (January – March) for one of my co-teaching classes, and decided to go with a music unit. So I’ve been reading a lot of lesson plans, worksheets, and exercises that teachers have put out there on the web, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the kids, who are all around ten years old, and mostly bilingual. Then I had to wrap my head around the best way to organize and present the material. My first lesson was Saturday, and it went quite well. =)
I think that’s all of the major stuff. I’ve done some traveling with Yuko recently that I should blog about. And I keep taking photographs of weird stuff with the ultimate goal of putting them up here. I’m sure I’ll figure out a way.
I had a kid visit class today that really scared me. Not in a “trenchcoat mafia” kind of way, but in a “holy crap, your existence shakes the core of what I know about how to do my job” kind of way.
For the first time since I moved to Japan, I met a bilingual Japanese kid.
He’s six years old, and his English speaking ability is arguably better than my office manager’s (listening unarguably so). He goes to a special school that’s taught all in English, a school which Ms. Semba says “only very rich families can pay for.” He and his classmates are only allowed to speak English while at school, so speaking English is (literally) second nature to him. Neither of his parents speak it fluently, though his mom chopped together a “thank you” when I complimented her son’s language skills, so it’s apparently all learned at school. He says his class is very small, and that makes sense from a practical perspective; if you need to police young’uns’ predilections to speak the same language at school as they do at home, it’s far easier to do if you can count them on your fingers. I’m seriously impressed at the level of dedication his parents have to teaching him speak English well.
But here’s the thing- if he’s going to be one of my students, what the heck am I going to do with him? The difficulty levels of the books I currently use progress in maturity and English ability in accordance with the average ESL learner, which means that the books I have at his English level are aimed at young adults. While he was in the office today, he spent some time in my classroom with three other kids his age who all barely know the alphabet. I talked to him like I would any American child, and he seemed to have the vocabulary of the average American first grader, which brings me back to my point.
I’m scared of having him as a student because it means I’ll have to do some serious growing as a teacher. I’ve become comfortable with my role as an ESL teacher, and now I’m going to have to be a “regular” English teacher to two kids (he’s bringing a friend from school) who already speak English.
I guess this means I’m going to be expanding my repertoire, which is good. It’ll involve more work than I’m doing right now, because I can’t imagine Ms. Semba will spring for any more books, especially for an unusual situation like this. That means I’m going to have to come up with a new curriculum, but I’m not sure where to start. American Language School is an “eikaiwa,” literally “English conversation” school, and the point of all our lessons is English communication, but I can’t just sit and have a chat with a couple of six-year olds.
I think I have a lot of reading to do. If you’re a teacher with experience teaching language skills to children, do you have any specific suggestions where I should start?
I have one student with whom I’ve been struggling almost continuously since I started teaching English with ALS. (This picture of her is from the school’s Halloween party.) She’s a cute little six-year old, but her parents are a bit older than average, and let her get away with murder at home.
I’ve seen her hit her mom, and her mother mildly scold her for it, to the daughter’s squealing delight, if that gives you any idea.
Anyway, because she knows no consequences outside of the classroom, I’ve had to introduce her to the concept inside the classroom. She doesn’t much care for not getting her way all the time, but she’s seemed to pay me more and more respect (or at least lip service) over the last few months.
Fast forward to today, her first lesson after the school’s winter break.
She was an absolute angel. She listened to me, she was focused on her studies, she nicely collected and handed me the word cards we were using without being asked, even using “Here you are” and “You’re welcome” without prompting.
I don’t know what was different for her today, but I hope it happens every day she has a lesson. =)
I found out a couple weeks ago that ALS had just penned a deal with a solar cell manufacturer here in Matsuyama to provide English lessons for sixty of its employees. The contract has me there for one two-hour lesson each week, for a succession of three eight week classes, twenty students in each.
That’s all well and good; I have lots of experience teaching larger groups of adults. The problem is that the company doesn’t have any specific goals, and I had just less than two weeks to create the entire course. If you’ll recall, this is my first TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) gig, and I’m just over one month into my actual teaching.
I sat down and wrote an outline of what I thought would be useful for them to know and reduced it by what we (I) couldn’t teach in sixteen hours. Ms. Semba and I sat down and hashed out a thing or two that she wanted to include, then we both sat down with Mr. Teshima, and he added a pinch or two of his own, and I somehow managed to come up with a workable set of lesson plans from everything that we all wanted to see. Let me tell you though, that was a seriously stressful time. Not as stressful as hearing I have a job in Japan if I could pack my entire house and move to a foreign country in a week and a half though, so I figured I could handle it.
Well, the first lesson was this Wednesday, and it went pretty well. Ms. Semba was there with me, and I’m very glad she was. No one there really spoke any English (what were you expecting?), so just getting to the classroom would have been a project, as their reception desk was an unmanned phone and a list of extensions (in Japanese). Also, she planned an exercise that we ended up using because they whipped through the material I had prepared faster than I thought they would.
The first lesson was good because it helped me figure out their level of English (higher than I thought it would be), and because I got to meet the students, feel out the class, and get an idea of what things will go over well and what won’t. As I’m sure Shannon (and Shannon) will back me up in saying, every classroom is different, and adjusting your plans to the audience is a crucial part of making a good lesson. My lesson plans are basically cave art at this point, scorched sticks crudely scraped on stone, so I need every little boost I can get. I’ve created handouts and set out goals and exercises, but I’m still not sure they should be called “lesson plans.” Ms. Wood tells me that creating lesson plans will soon be second nature, and I hope that’s true, because right now, just thinking about this project causes me stress.
Anyway, I have another meeting today. Wish me luck.
