life post laptop ramble
Last night, in the absence of having Voyager episodes to watch or email to check, I cleaned my apartment (more like shuffled things into different piles) and made ready for winter (dug my kerosene heater out of the media equivalent of a snowdrift).
I also cooked dinner, for the first time in awhile. I’ve been skipping or eating out or bumming food since being sick, and it felt a little alien being back in the kitchen. It felt empty, too, like a missing presence over on the desk. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think my computer was a person…so maybe it’s just that I felt the ever-present emptiness more keenly without Voyager to fill the silence.
Last year at this time I felt peaceful in my home, but this year I feel uneasy, bored, lonely. The boredom probably means there is something I should be doing but am avoiding (studying Japanese, for example).
Anyway, that’s just ramble. Something occured to me today as I took a survey for the benefit of AJET, a volunteer association of JETs who interface with the Japanese government division that oversees our job.
It asked me questions about team-teaching, my co-teachers, their English level and how much I am included in the process of teaching English at my school and to my surprise, I could not answer negatively to any of the questions. I am useful at this school in that I actually get to teach my classes. I have a lot of control over what is attempted in class, if not how it turns out. My JTEs speak English well and are not afraid to use it, for the most part.
I’m not always happy with how things go, but it’s not the fault of the program–more like me getting frustrated with my students for not having a high enough English level to do very interesting activities.
(More accurately, I get frustrated with myself for not being a better teacher, when I do an activity and the kids seem bored. Other subjects may be boring but mine is not supposed to be!
(I feel guilty when I look back on a class and realize I should have fleshed out the lesson more, like yesterday when I based an exercise on material I assumed they had learned in their grammar class but apparently have not.
(In fact, recent delves into the English 1 textbook as well as a new policy of pausing to ask the kids whether or not they understand what I’m saying both lead me to believe that a) I am not understood a lot of the time and b) they are masters of pretense and will never ever tell me if they don’t get it. Maybe it’s a Japanese thing, or maybe all students do it, but it looks like it’s up to me to interpret feedback because my co-teachers will never tell me when I’m off track.)
Other of my grumblings have to do with sometimes not feeling loved and needed, but all in all, job satisfaction or dissatisfaction comes from success in the classroom, and feeling perhaps not properly qualified to do this job* without the language skills. Other than that…based on the human tape recorder stories of many of my friends, I’m pretty grateful to be where I am. My teachers are good, my kids aren’t bad, I can’t complain though I like to.
*It begs the question, what is this job? That’s a bit of a mystery, actually. The ALT job description is a vague list of happy end goals for the future of Japan. Teaching English is not specifically on that list. Among other things, I am supposed to experience Japan and take the experience home with me to share with the rest of the world. Which is pretty much the sweetest job ever. But I do sometimes wonder guiltily** how to best spend my time/earn my salary while I’m here.
**There’s that word again. Hmm.
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