Original post
Today was my first day of work. I have just finished 3 days of on the job training which was pretty scary. The first day went fairly well overall. I only had 5 lessons. I was able to reuse two lessons from before so my planning time was nicely reduced. It still takes me too long to plan a lesson. I also talked to my long time Japanese penpal on the phone tonight. Thankfully her English is much much better than my Japanese or it would have been a very difficult conversation.
2013 Notes
Nova on the job training (OJT) is a terrifying experience. On the first day you learn how to choose and create a lesson. You observe an experienced teacher actually giving the lesson. Day 2 and 3 involve actually teaching lessons and getting feedback from observing teachers. Due to the high turnover, training time is kept short to maximize the amount of time teachers can be making money for the school. I believe that lesson quality could have been better with some more instruction, but Nova was a business, and that business wanted to make money.
The conversation with the Penpal was interesting – it was the first time I had ever heard her voice. The conversation was fairly short, and mainly served to set up a meeting two days later in Kamakura. Take a guess what my next post will be about…
Drinking in Japan 