Preparations Part 1 - Teaching Resources

I think I'm a victim of my own spare time. While some incoming JETs have been working full time right up until departure later this week, I've literally had nothing but JET-prep to worry about. However, when you've got all the time in the world you find all sorts of things that can be done, useful things, but things that might be done faster, more efficiently or not at all if time was of the essence and some triage is necessary. I am capable of this mode of operation--I only hope it kicks in once I get to Japan.

And so the last three weeks have gone incredibly quickly and you'd think that with all the time in the world I'd be more than ready to go! I'm not...but I am close.

So, what have I been up to? Well...

I've been in touch with the Regional Advisers in Niigata Prefecture, and one in particular has being going out of his way to help me get crucial information. Through him I found out that I am going to be working in not one but four schools! I'll be at my base school two days a week and at the other three one day a week each. Three of the four are within walking distance of where I'll be living (<2km or so) and one is a 45 minute drive away up in the mountains (yay!). So, I will have to get a car. It seems that there is a good long term rental service set up for JETs so I'll look into this further when I get to Joetsu.

In the meantime, going from prepping for one school to four required a bit of a mental shift. I'd hitherto devoted a lot of time to prepping materials targeted at my base school, a Super Science School. Now I had three more schools to prep for, which at first felt overwhelming how much I'd already invested in prepping for just one school up to that point. I felt guilty about not now having enough time (or money most likely) to prepare materials for the other three schools to the same degree. But of course, many of my resources will be able to be used in all four schools (they are all high schools fortunately), so it really wasn't as big of a deal as it seemed at first. That said, assembling materials has been no small task.

I'd been in contact with both the principal and my supervising Japanese Teacher of English (JTE) at my base school to see what resources they'd like me to bring with me. They requested NZ-themed things, maps and science textbooks. To this end I've been trawling TradeMe and various other online stores, as well as visiting various bookstores and second hand stores around Dunedin. FYI, in case you'd forgotten (like I had), textbooks are expensive! Especially when you want to buy more than one. In the end I settled on some from the Oxford University Press as NZ-textbooks seem to targeted toward individual NCEA assessments (DON'T get me started on NCEA...I was the first year to endure it), and the ones from the UK were both visually more engaging and cheaper!

As well as textbooks I thought some eye-catching posters might be a good idea so in addition to buying up some geology-related ones I've always wanted an excuse to get, I did a walk around of all the science departments at the university to see if they had any they didn't want any more. I received the full spectrum of responses, but if there had been a poster-provision competition the physics department would have won hands down for content and appearance, and the zoology department for generosity and helpfulness. You guys rock!

In addition to sourcing academic resources I also sent out emails to NZ national organisation equivalents of all of the clubs at my base school to see if they could send me a flier (or something) I could take to use as an authentic English language text that would be relevant to the students' interests. The response from this was very positive, with about half of the organisations sending me stuff to take with me. For the remainder I've been trawling the internet to find some kind of flier or poster I can print out (when I get to Japan).

One of four fliers I found online giving short descriptions of various basketball skills.

Only one club doesn't have a NZ equivalent--the Hyakunin Isshu Karuta club. I'll discuss this greater detail in another post (karuta is a pet interest of mine), but suffice to say here that it is a card-game-come-sport involving 100 playing cards each printed with one of a 100-strong anthology (the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu) of hundreds of years old Japanese poems. Only in Japan would an art like poetry be seamlessly turned into a sport--and a highly competitive one at that! Partly for the club and partly for my own interest I decided to make a poster comprising the 100 karuta cards with the poems printed in English instead of Japanese...whereupon I entered the minefield that is the vast range of translations that can be had from one language to another, particularly where poetry is concerned.

Karuta playing cards

A pro-karuta match in full swing...literally.

In the end I settled on a translation of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu by Professor Joseph Mostow of the University of British Columbia and pinged him an email to ask if he minded me using them. He was very happy for me to do so and even requested seeing a copy of the poster when I was done. So, the poster is made and printed...but I'm now doing that typical thing I do and having doubts about whether or not to give it to the karuta club or not. This is mainly because for the purposes of karuta the sequence of similar sounding words in the poems is critical to game strategy, but in translation these sequences are completely lost. There is another translation out there which preserves it, and I can't help feeling that although it may be a more constrained translation, it might be more relevant to the karuta club's interest in the poems. Oh well, that's a problem to be faced another day. I can always update the poster another time (typing out 100 poems takes some time and right now I have more pressing matters).

Right, so, that's resources etc. more or less covered, but that wasn't the real problem going from one to four schools presented. In Japan there is a tradition of giving a gift, called "omiyage", when you return (or in my case arrive) from a foreign (or even regional) locale. Omiyage are traditionally small edible items (must be individually wrapped!) and while not required, come highly recommended as something for incoming JETs to organise as it helps make a good first impression with your new bosses and colleagues...by showing them you understand and are keen to partake in Japanese customs (or else just blatantly bribing them with sweets). The thing with omiyage is that you should bring enough for everyone to try, and you should get something a little bit special for the heads of the school (principal and vice-principal), and your supervisor (who is supposed to be responsible for helping you settle in). The most special thing should go to the principal, then the vice-principal and so-on. My base school has 50 staff in total including 10 JTEs (I'd planned to get a little extra something for each of them as well since these are the teachers I'll be working with personally).  Having already committed a certain amount of money as well as luggage space and weight to omiyage for my base school, the immediate questions was: how many staff do my other schools have?! I was having visions of lugging two suitcases to the airport--one for me and one full of omiyage. Not an option! I am determined for logistics and financial reasons to take one checked bag and one checked bag only!

See my next post for this solution to this little conundrum...