Showing posts with label Moving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Moving. Show all posts

Oh, wait, is this actually a post?
Holy cow, stop the presses. Chino is actually making a blog post.


For the first time in over two years.

Two. Years.


Yeah. It's about time.







There are several reasons for the untimely death of this blog. The main being a big misunderstanding between my boss and I as to what counts as "on the clock hours" and "adequate staffing". I guess two full-time teachers and a handful of unqualified part-timers is enough in her book to teach over 280 hours of class time a month, plus planning, lesson creation, and travel between classrooms. In reality, could have used a few more full-time teachers.



However, that will be behind me starting from the 23rd of this month.

Why?

I got a new job.

That's right. I have a new job. A better one. Not just in terms of pay, but in satisfaction levels and personal worth.

I will be starting a job as a full-time English teacher at a private joint Junior High/Senior High School on the west side of Hiroshima City. Far, far, far away from my current babysitting English School job.

I'll be leaving a lot of friends and memories behind, but I'll be moving on to a position that will help me further my career as a teacher. I'll be part of a qualified team of teachers holding actual teaching certificates in creating a curriculum. The school will be using an English textbook for the first time in years starting in April. Every detail I have heard about this job just creates an abundence of energy and excitement.

I get to be a real teacher. A real. Teacher. Like, in a classroom. In a school. With students. With classes that only I and my paired native co-teacher are in charge of.

No more seeing classes once a month if I'm lucky.
No more crisscrossing the city racing to get to three different classrooms in a single day with my only break time being my commute between classes.
No more having to pull lessons out of thin air because only two kids out of an eight person class showed up.

I get to have meaningful lessons with kids who want to learn and have the support of an experienced teaching team and a school that prides itself on personally tailored curriculum. Kids from this school scored the highest on a national writing test the past school year. Every single test taker got a perfect score.
Their test scores for grammar knowledge have been lacking, hence the start of a textbook, but that has mainly been due to the fact that national tests are set up in the same order as grammar is taught in textbooks. Without a textbook, the teachers have been bouncing around grammar topics as they see fit. This has resulted in the students knowing things "out of order" by Japanese standards. They'll know some things that are on the test, not known some things on the test, but know other things that aren't being tested yet. Moms in the PTA have gotten through the the principal and other members of the school board, so now a text book and weekly review sessions by a teacher of Japanese decent have been added to the curriculum.




Anyway. Enough about that. The reason I say that my current job is behind me starting the 23rd despite the new school year starting in April, is because the 23rd is my first training session at the new school.
My husband, Odin, Freya and I will be moving to Hiroshima sometime either March 21st or 22nd.
We're still looking for an apartment. We're going by night bus this Friday to look at apartment over the weekend. The company that hired me as a teacher for the school has already asked a real estate agent they know in the area to find us a good place, and I should hear back from them sometime this week. Hopefully we'll find something nice in our price range.



But as such, since I will no longer be affiliated with the job that prompted the start of this blog, I will be removing the link to the school in the top header bar. I may still do a few Japanese site reviews, but I think I shall try to turn this more into a personal blog. A place where I can air my mind out about things that perturb me about Japan, and a place to post photos. I'm also hoping that I'll have the time and energy to start posting over at Odin's Abode again. I have a year of photos of Odin and Freya that need to be edited and posted. They turn 3 on the 17th this month. They're huge and have gone through a lot in the past 6-8 months, so I have plenty to put on that blog once I have time.



So, I guess that's it for now. Come back from time to time starting in April to see if I've gotten into the flow of things and have started posting again. Hopefully there will be something here!
3/05/2012 10:43:00 PM | Category: , , , , , , | 1 comments

Moving Fun
Well our move it finally well over. We still have a few more things we need to pick up for the new apartment, mainly bookcases and bins to put all the junk we have. How in the world we managed to store all this stuff in my tiny 1-bedroom for two years is beyond me. We have literally three times the amount of space of my old apartment, but nowhere to put anything. I guess we were so used to just stuffing things in boxes in the upper part of my closet to really notice how much stuff we have.

This weekend the NTT guys come to see if we can install fiber optic or not. I can't wait for Saturday to come. I just home the day they want to come and actually install it, myself or my husband will be home. I have a majorly busy schedule next month, so who knows.



I would review a Japanese site today, but am still looking for a good next page to review. I need to start a running list of all the sites out there so I can keep better track. Big sites I'd like to review are definitely JapanesePod101 and About.com's Japanese pages, but I want to get my feet wet with more smaller sites first.



In other words, expect a review sometime next week. Most likely sometime on Tuesday. I'm going to spend the rest of my "blogging hour" searching for a list of websites to review.


I will leave you with one promotional thing. If you are serious about studying Japanese, and are in the market for a good kanji dictionary, I completely and totally suggest The Kanji Dictionary. It's a $70 dictionary that is unique in that you can search for a kanji combination (i.e. kanji that comprises of two or more kanji) by ANY kanji in the word. Most make you search by only the first kanji, but if you're not sure on the radical can be difficult. My friends got me this for my 17th birthday and I have now taken it to Japan three times and used it constantly in my college studies. It also has many useful appendices in the back, such as a conversion chart for Japanese calendar years, diagrams of Japanese school and political systems, and many maps of the country.
For those not willing to plunk down $70 on a dictionary, they make a smaller Learner's Dictionary version, usually for $25. My university's Japanese department had several of these for student use. While they don't have as much as the $70 version (they lack a lot of older, rarely-seen kanji), they are still just as useful and as easy to use.

I still prefer to use my big, fat, heavy, can-bash-someone's-head-in $70 dictionary to look up kanji combinations than my designed-for-Japanese-people electronic dictionary. So much easier to use, in my opinion. I wouldn't trade this dictionary in for the world. My first year here in Gifu I thought I lost it, and it heartbroke me, until I went home and found it in a box of stuff I moved out of my old room at college when I graduated. It promptly went back into my suitcase back to Japan.



As I think of more books and dictionaries that I think are useful in studying Japanese, I'll be sure to post links. If I had access to more Japanese textbooks other than the one I used in college and the one I use to teach my husband, I'd also do textbook reviews.
2/24/2009 06:22:00 PM | Category: , , | 0 comments