#jet programme

2018 was rough. I was given an additional school in the first semester (March to July) as we had someone find a better job. I enjoyed it, but it was a bit of a rough go especially when I was transferred that August after three fantastic years at Tsubaki JHS and ES and only a semester there. I legit went through the five stages of grief - which I think is another reason I stopped blogging. I was given my current base school along with four other schools. Going from 2(3) to 5 schools was a bit of an adjustment. I still feel a bit spread out.

That said, I keep running into teachers and students who were at the Tsubaki’s. The teachers shuffle around every April, so it's always a lottery with which new faces are going to be old friends (or enemies…). A couple of kids moved and transferred into my current schools from Tsubaki too. So I have one kid I can say I've been teaching for 6 out of the 7 years I've been here!

One of the kids who was in JHS 3rd grade when I first got here (in 2015!) hangs out around one of my favorite cafes, so I got chatting with him recently. He's in his second year of nursing school - his class nearly broke me in the first year, it was really a trial by fire with those kids. I was 22 then, and he’s 20 now, so it was interesting chatting to him about that first year of teaching. His younger sister was one of my favorite students too, she was in the group of kids that graduated in the March of 2018, the year group that went through Tsubaki JHS with me - they’re newly minted University students now!

This Thursday morning when I was cycling in to work, a kid who was 2nd year JHS when I left  (so 2nd or 3rd year JHS now) pulled up with their Mum in a van and got their mamachari out of the back to bike to school. The franticness of it all was hilarious. Their Mum legit sat on the horn until I pulled over. I was so happy to run into this kid, even at social distance and both of us late to work/school - because we both remembered each other and as they were going around the corners they were yelling each time they turned and humming the old elementary school directions chant and pelting me with questions about what I’ve been up to.

I've had so many students and schools now, that everything is kind of running into a blur. I remember flashes of kids faces and voices, random memories of in class or out of class shenanigans out of the blue. Also, I now, more than ever, have issues remembering kids' names, but I still know their faces (even with their masks), whose homeroom class they were in, who their friends were and which club they were in. I get random flashbacks to past conversations with them when I see them on the street or we run into each other. I feel bad because the first thing former students ask is ‘Do you remember my name?’ and I always have to be like, ‘Honestly, no, but I remember you did this on x day, x month in x classroom’.

Socially in 2018 -2019 - a few of our friends went home and things shook up a little. Our DnD group changed a bit - one of our players stepped into the role forever DM (THANK YOU RALPH). From memory the newbies were great - some of them just went home at the start of last month and it’s weird not seeing them around (JESS DO YOUR BEST!). I think we only have one or two people left from that rotation. There’s no 6th year ALTs, and only two 5th years.

Aug 2018 - Aug 2019 was the year of Hiura - my mountain school. Dang man, they were so cool. The students of the JHS and the ES combined barely hit 30, so each class was between 3-10 students depending on the grade. It was easier to get to know the kids, their abilities and their goals than it has been for me at other schools. I miss it so bad, being in nature once a week did my country-kid heart so good! The bugs! The frogs! The river! The mountain! The monkeys! The lizards! The dilapidated houses and hidden shrines!!!! The random crabs in the English room...I forgot that there was such a thing as freshwater crabs, and being right next to a river, the invasion wasn’t as out of place as I first thought...  

The area is so picturesque and calming. Every week up there was a small adventure (after getting over my motion sickness from the bus ride up). The kids were constantly pranking either myself or the main English teacher. There was always some new weird bug or lizard in a tank to be educated about. There were chickens on the way to the JHS that used to escape from their cardboard box prisons to run riot on the gardens. There were old people to freak out with my youth and foreignness! The kids also got to do a lot of extra classes, sumiyakai (making charcoal the traditional way), planting and maintaining rice paddies, setting up vegetable gardens, raising fireflies, conserving a special breed of fire lily (only found in this particular mountain valley) and another rare flower, wilderness training ect.

I wish I could have stayed there a lot longer but SOMEONE (read...the BoE) decided that schools had to be shuffled again(thank goodness the dude who has it now was able to keep it from the 2021 shuffle, he's the best fit for the school). I had so many good memories from there, I wish I had been more consistent in writing it down. I do have a bunch of photos and videos from there though, so that's nice. The only thing I don’t miss is the bus trip up and down - not only was it motion sickness, there was a healthy dose of fear each ride as the driver brought us perilously close to the edge of the mountain drop…

2019 - 2020 was interesting. With the school I got given instead of the Hirua’s I was roped into more demonstration lessons which was a lot of pressure because I was also involved quite heavily with the JHS observation and training lessons too. They were somewhat rewarding, the third graders are now super smart 5th graders, but the teachers  who need to embrace the new curriculum and ways of teaching really haven’t taken on anything from the lessons....

Outside of work as well, I was given the chance, thanks to an ALT buddy of mine, to join in with the local festival. It's been one of the biggest highlights of my time here, and I am gutted it’s been cancelled for the last two years, but I understand the reason…. I was able to travel to Okinawa too during that summer for an international Karate seminar with the Dojo I train with. I met the head of the style I currently practice and a bunch of people from around the world. I also got to see Shuri castle before it burned down. So that was a stroke of luck. One of the places I want to go when/if we get out of this pandemic is Okinawa. I want to see more of those Islands so bad. Just before the whole pandemic thing too - I managed to see the Rugby World Cup, a Canada vs NZ match, I even ran into Tana Umanga in Oita city!!!

2019 - 2020 was supposed to be my last year on JET, so I was frantically Job hunting. I went to the Career Fair in Osaka in early Feb/Late January 2020. I applied and got interviewed for a position in Sendai in early Jan 2020. In the end though - the Rona hit. We started hearing whispers of it around the end of 2019, then the cruise boats happened, and then Japan refused to cancel the Olympics...every holiday season there is a new wave of infections, my nurse friends in Tokyo are struggling....my teacher friends in more populous areas of Japan are struggling…

JET couldn't get new ALTs for 2020-2021, I took the extra year when it was eventually offered, as the one job I had managed to get a serious offer for was hesitating because with the rona setting in, things were uncertain. There was a lot of time spent adjusting to the new rules surrounding what we could do in class with the kids as well as textbook change. Schools shut on and off during the spring months. 

I also got a reminder of my mortality mid May with an unrelated illness which is still smacking me around a bit - stress/age, it does things to the human body it has no right to. It's only been in the last three months I’ve been able to exercise like I used to, I’ve put on a bunch of weight I can't shrug off (one part medication, another part diet) My relationship with food needs to change, and I really need a kitchen that allows me for more than one pan meals. I also need to figure out what to do with a left leg that is in constant pain from the knee down and a heart that misses beats when stressed out (mentally and physically…). 

My apartment also got flooded by the guy upstairs at one point, I spent most of late February/early March living in a hotel while my walls and floor got redone - I think this was one of the things that really stressed me out and kicked my anxiety right up a notch, it was right when things were getting REALLY bad with rona-chan in Hokkaido and schools were shutting down here as it was filtering into the prefecture and so Japan closed schools for the first time…

Classes in covid times have been weird. We’ve been wearing facemasks full time since the early stages of the pandemic (March 2020) - so I admit that I get a bit pissed off seeing both Americans and New Zealanders back home bitching about just having to start wearing them full time in public. I have asthma and have been suffering with the things on during the 30*C plus with high 90s humidity summers. Teachers were offered vaccines late July 2021, just days before the Olympics were open - and I finished my two shots in the middle of August. But the overall distribution and take up of the jab has been slow.  As mentioned above, we can't play a lot of the games we used to play with kids in classes anymore, and a lot of the activities outlined in the textbook curriculum need to be adjusted too, so we’ve had to be creative. We use hand sanitizer a lot more too. One of the things I miss the most though, is eating lunch with the kids.

Socially from summer 2020 - now 2021 we played a lot of DnD and board games, both online and in person when we could. There were no new ALTs again for the 2021-2022 JET year, and those of us who were in 6th year were offered a 7th. Four out of six of us took it. As a whole we’re down from a peak of 38 ALTs for Junior High and Elementary school to 22 for now. We hopefully will get a new person at the end of September, and 4 more in November. Which will bring us to 27. This has led to ANOTHER round of school shuffles.

Summer vacation has been weird the last two years. With rona-chan, we haven’t really been able to travel. All the summer festivals (all the Autumn and Winter ones too!) have been cancelled, so the changing of seasons just feels, wrong. I dunno. There is so much we all miss from pre-rona-chan, and so much that doesn’t happen that makes this just feel like one long long unending year of sadness, coldness, raininess, unbearable heat and repeat. I’m tired. Time is going so fast, but so.dang.slow.

I lost my favorite school (AGAIN GDI!!!) and gained the school I taught a semester at in 2019....I had my first day there on Wednesday. Schools actually started back on September 1st so there was some drama as the BoE didn’t communicate fast enough about our school changes. We legit got told on the 27th of August (on a Friday) our schools were changing effective September 1st, but somehow some of our schools found out on the Monday 30th August. In July we were told we would be changing schools at the end of September, so.a lot of ALTs and schools were left short changed, not having opportunities to say goodbye to co-workers or students/having their planning for the semester more or less thrown out the window too. I love my job. I really dislike the way the BoE treats us, the Japanese assistant language teachers and our schools.

The new school I have is used to having an ALT there twice a week, who plans all the lessons and executes them. I’m at three elementary schools. I'm only at each once a week, I want to plan, but being that I miss an entire lesson in between visits, it's going to be difficult to do so. Not impossible, but being that I'm already doing it for two other schools, who are at two different places in the textbook ah…….. From what I have talked to my new supervisor about though, it sounds like the teachers have taken on more of the lesson planning and I'll be able to contribute ideas when I'm there. I just want to and wish I could do more without being confused all the time. (This is all usually done in my second language too, not in English so extra levels of confusion and miscommunication abound).

 I feel like this at my JHS too a lot of the time. I want to contribute more, but even with constant communication with my main in school supervisor (who is a badass and pretty much on the same page about everything with me) I still feel about as useful as tits on a bull. Especially now that classes have been cancelled and or shortened, there's less time to do stuff. Any game or activity I plan is usually cut in favor of making up time in the textbook. When I'm in class, I'm back to being a tape recorder, the fun police and general nuisance.　

Also in the last week...my two of my schools were  shut due to students testing positive for the rona. This is the second time my schools have had a scare in the last 8 months. And by shut, I mean the students were all at home, but the teachers  all had to come into the office. Because why not I guess….. I mean,  the cases increasing is really not unexpected with the amount of people who were travelling over obon and the increase of cases due to the Olympics/Japan being slow on vaccinating/delta being the dominant strain/Japan's leaders doing relatively little except asking shops and restaurants to limit people coming in at one time and closing before 8pm. I know my schools weren't the only one shut either - but still High Schools were having their sports days this week. I kept on seeing groups of kids hanging in the park after, so that was a little bit nerve wracking.

It's just frustrating - we’ve been on half days to “minimize the risk of infection” for kids and teachers, as if only being at school from 8am through to 1pm is going to reduce the risk.  My schools have only just started testing out Microsoft teams and Zoom lesson equipment. Thankfully our school’s run in this time was contained real quick, the family was super good about informing us when they got their results back, and the fact they needed to be tested. The homeroom teacher and the students from the same class were the only ones tested, and they all came back clear, which was nice. But the information came back so SLOW. 

I’m a little irritated because I found out on Wednesday night what was going on, and even if I am vaccinated, I am super worried that I will end up being the covid monkey due to being at different schools three days out of five. I think other than being worried that I will catch it myself and get real sick, my biggest fear is that I will be protected from bad symptoms from the vaccine, but still be able to pass it onto some of my more vulnerable friends and students. The whole thing is a mess.  

Other than Covid and BoE drama, life is good. I’ve had a couple of other big changes - both fantastic and not so great, but yeah.  I have my health (and health insurance!) for now. I have a job, for now. I have a sense of existential dread for the next 12 months, but we’ll see where we end up. Life post JET is going to be way less cushy and I am TERRIFIED. I mean, I have a BA in Eng/Ling and no idea what to do with it…..because I am NOT suited for academia.