Posts Tagged Nova
November 8, 2003 – Lazy teacher
Posted by Barniferous in Keikyu-Kawasaki NOVA, Teaching English on November 8, 2013
Original Post
Man I love Saturdays at Keikyu! I had a no show for my last lesson, so I sat in the teacher`s room and read a book and sent email with my phone.
2013 Update
As someone who takes a lot of pride in their work, reading my original post really made me cringe. NOVA was one of the few English schools that paid you even if students didn’t show up for lessons. If you were scheduled for 5 lessons, you got paid for 5 lessons even if nobody was there. In turn, the expectation is that when you have a free lesson that you find something productive to do in the office, and not just sit around reading and texting.
Kawasaki NOVA was always insanely busy, so nobody had ever needed to explain what I should do if I had an empty lesson. A few weeks after this original post, I was in the same situation and a senior teacher explained the priorities. The job list for free lessons included:
- Preparation of kids class materials – there was always some colouring, stapling or glueing that needed to be done for kids classes.
- Lesson preparation – ensuring that you were prepared for your upcoming lessons and reviewing or improving your current lessons
- Maintenance of student files – removing old students, replacing folders that were falling apart
- Tidying the office – teachers are generally very messy and there were always files, books and other things lying around the office
- Assisting the staff
From that time forward, whenever I saw a new teacher sitting around doing nothing I was able to get them working.
November 1, 2003 – Keikyu Kawasaki Nova
Posted by Barniferous in Keikyu-Kawasaki NOVA, Teaching English on November 1, 2013
Keikyu Kawasaki station
Original Post
I got to work at Keikyu Kawasaki today. It is a satellite branch of Kawasaki NOVA. It was very calm and relaxed, and I was done early. I get to work here every Friday and Saturday in November, and hopefully longer!
2013 Update
In 2003 NOVA was working on a massive expansion. Some of their advertising material included the slogan “learn English near the station”, so they decided to have an English school closer to a train station than any of their major competitors.
JR Kawasaki station is a major train station on the Nanbu, Keihin Tohoku and Tokaido lines. It servies 185,000 passengers per day. The station is connected to a large, sprawling underground shopping centre. Having a large English school near Kawasaki station makes a lot of sense. Kawasaki NOVA usually had a roster of 22+ teachers and featured many classrooms, a voice room and two fully stocked kids classrooms.
Keikyu Kawasaki station is a smaller station on the private Keikyu line. It serves about 58,500 passengers per day. It is not connected to the underground shopping area and is only 500 meters away from Kawasaki station. Since one of the competitors opened an English school close to Keikyu Kawasaki station, NOVA decided to open a small branch slightly closer to the station. Keikyu Kawasaki NOVA usually had 3 teachers (rotated in from Kawasaki NOVA), and had one shared voice / kids classroom.
Kawasaki NOVA had extra capacity and facilities, so there was no good busines reason to have another branch 500 meters away. NOVA’s “I’m closer to the station than you are” expansion policy in a country with extremely expensive real estate was likely one of the main contibuting factors to their eventual bankruptcy. That and gross mismanagement from the CEO, but that’s another story.
As a teacher, I thoroughly enjoyed shifts at Keikyu Kawasaki NOVA, which provided a break from the fast pace and chaos of Kawasaki NOVA.
October 18, 2003 – The blind leading the blind
Posted by Barniferous in Kawasaki Nova, Teaching English on October 18, 2013
(complete rewrite from the original post)
Work was insane today. Overall there were 4 schedule changes. Since I am still pretty new, it takes me a long time to plan my lessons. A schedule change may involve a new student added into a lesson. That new student might have recently done the lesson you were planning to teach, which will involve finding a new lesson that works for everyone. It is also possible to have your entire lesson switched with another teacher to avoid the same student having two lessons in a row with the same teacher. Again, this will involve coming up with something new on short notice.
Due to continuous changes, I ended up with a business class student for a short time. The business class involved a set curriculum which I knew nothing about. Fortunately one of the senior teachers saw the problem and got this fixed before I failed spectacularly. My other big challenge was being scheduled with a low level student who was nearly completely blind. Nova was supposed to be heavily focused on speaking and listening, but there was still a big textbook component to the lessons. Some of the more experienced teachers had been given special instruction on how to work with blind students, but I am still a novice teacher about 3 weeks into the job. I ended up getting switched to the Voice room 5 minutes before the class started.
Kawasaki Nova is too busy!
October 3, 2003 – Enter the Penpal
Posted by Barniferous in Kawasaki Nova, Teaching English, The Penpal on October 3, 2013
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 
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