What do teachers really make?
I rather like this piece of youtube excellence.
Being an English teacher in Tokyo is akin to sitting on the lowest rung of the social ladder and I have been, over the years, quite amused/astonished/appalled by the number of (non-Japanese) finance/IT/law people who literally smile through their teeth and make their excuses to walk away after they’ve heard the answer to their question ‚Äúso, what do you do?‚Äù (almost always the first question).
What do teachers really make? We try to make a difference, and I’m proud of what we do. I accept that there are some utterly hopeless teachers out there. But I am not one of them (blowing my own horn?), and neither are most of the people I am honoured to work with. It’s hard work but Oh, so rewarding.
Technorati Tags: teachingenglish, TESOL
Kids (aka why I love teaching English in Japan)
Today was graduation day at the elementary school. Twas a lot of feverish fun with excited kids and proud parents and teachers. I love my job. The bottom 2 pictures were taken last week and are of my fave class: the returnees (kids who have lived outside Japan for most of their lives).
Technorati Tags: japan, teachingenglish, tokyo
Komichii Festival
Breakdance show
Look closely – one kid is popping on one hand, the other is doing the splits in midair – I wrote about these kids before actually…
The breakdance boyz
Dance club girls
Dance club girls in action
Me and Wataru. He told me once after running into him in random streets all over Tokyo for like the 350th time that it’s our fate to be friends. He’s a special kid, utterly hilarious and wise beyond his years.
These two ratbags hang out in the park way too much. Tim the-punk-rock-pimp asked them on Friday night what they were doing, riding their bikes around, expecting some half-baked school boy reply, and when they replied in perfect English, ‚Äúoh you know man, we’re just cruisin’‚Äù, Timbo had to do something of a double-take. I’ve been teaching Tomo, on the left, for 3 years straight. He’s such a *dude*.
These kids are actually from the Junior High School. What is it about J-boys and cross-dressing? They do it so damn well.
Spent the day at the annual school festival today and had a blast. The kids put so much time and effort into putting on a great show with heaps of fun stalls and great food to eat, not to mention the near-professional performances they spend months fine-tuning. The senior kids especially do it all with a great deal of gusto, because their school days are coming to a close. They finish up in December, ahead of the other kids who finish in February.
This year is going to be really sad coz the seniors leaving are the first kids I ever taught there, and they are my special ones… Notoriously naughty, full of character and sass – I run into them down in the park a little too often… (usually at night, when I’m drinking with my friends). Gonna miss them so. Most of the pics above are of the seniors. It’s my special tribute to them.
Technorati Tags: events, friends, japan, photography, school, tokyo
The TEFL International Phuket TESOL/TEFL course: A Review
These are the people I’ve spent the last month with. Actually, there are a few missing – Pete, the big boss, is taking the photo, and three had left two weeks earlier as they had already done half of the course online. Scattered in amongst the group are our 4 trainers, Greg, Clare, Simon and Urica. Great people. Anyway, I’ve been getting lots of questions about the course so I figured I’d do a review and try to cover as much as I can. If you’re not interested in English teaching then just move along folks. Nothing more to see here….
Technorati Tags: TESOL, teachingenglish, TEFLInternational, thailand, travel
A smooth transition
My last evening in Phuket was spent at Nikita’s Bar in lovely, laid back Rawai, with the teaching team from the course: Pete, Greg, Clare, Simon, Mark and their respective partners. A lovely way to go out. Didn’t plan to drink for 7 hours straight but hey, when in Rome 
…. Anyway, this was the view at sunset…. The other photo’s below were all taken the next day as I left Phuket: I hired a TukTuk to take me around to the more Northern beaches I hadn’t visited yet, on my way to the airport. A great way to farewell that beautiful island.
And now, after 6 weeks away, I’m back in Tokyo.
Technorati Tags: japan, photography, teachingenglish, thailand, tokyo, travel, travelphotography
The student reports…
A different kind of TV in a Phuket Restaurant
Technorati Tags: teachingenglish, thailand, travel
Enoshima Ensoku and summer parties
On Friday I went to Enoshima (a Tokyo beach district) with a class of 42 x 16/17 year olds from my high school for their annual ensoku (class fun outing). We played beach volleyball then headed off for lunch at a local Denny’s. They played out lots of the usual shenanigans – flirting, shouting and squealing, showing off and laughter. It was great fun. I do love hanging out with kids.
Technorati Tags: events, friends, japan, parties, school, teachingenglish, tokyo
A midweek post
Some deelightful street art in Harajuku.
Haven’t been doing much midweek posting of late but today was a significant day for a number of reasons and all them worth posting about.
Self Sponsored Visa in Japan: SUCCESSFUL application
My first self-sponsored visa application, submitted in Jan 2005, was successful. I am now the proud bearer of my very own shiny self-sponsored visa. Read on to hear how it happened, and be sure to read the comments from other readers as they may shed some light on your particular situation.
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This page is now quite old and probably a little out of date. I have noticed a sad consistency with all visa applications in Japan: they are run case by case, case-manager by case-manager and you NEVER get told the same thing. Kinda like Russian Roulette.
Good luck with your applications – I have reopened comments but I am NOT an immigration specialist and I don’t have the time to go investigating your questions – but maybe someone else will (though this is not a forum board)
doin’ it for the kids
Today I accepted another part time school teaching position. Why, you ask. Are you are a complete masochist? Well, yes, I guess I am. But it’s not so bad, actually. They specifically requested me, it’s great money, it’s not too long a shift, and it’s only once a week….
You’ll need to click on the extended entry link below to find out why…..
Keeping abreast of the times
Street art in Naka Meguro
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Meet the students
It’s pouring and a little chilly in Tokyo today and I’m making the most of a glorious day off indoors. A late rise, an hours yoga, a small breakfast, alternating with hot drinks – cups of coffee and then of tea and then of coffee again, accompanied by various tasty snacks including rice crackers and aero bars. And I’ve been photoshopping all afternoon. I have demolished the current backlog of folders and have a list of blog posts I want to make, and damn I am feeling EFFICIENT!
This is a post I’ve really been meaning to do for a very long time. I teach 13 private lessons a week, and two days at a high school, and 5 nights at a factory English conversation school. I’ve been very fortunate in that every single one of my private students is a wonderful person, and I can honestly say that they have helped me keep my sanity in this mad time of overwork and stress by being good friends and people who make me laugh. I wanted you to meet some of them.
the colours of summer
these beautiful coloured glass balls are modelled after traditional style japanese fishing net floats. over the past hundred years or so, thousands of these have washed up on australian and nuiginian beaches. my family collected the ones we found, and although mum and dad ended up selling a heap of them in a garage sale many years ago, i hung on to a few of them. i was stoked to see these fishing balls for sale in a tourist shop on enoshima island. i will be going back there and buying some.
in other news, i am happy to say that the darkness of the last 3 months has started to ease off and i am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. the main factor contributing to the improvement is the private english lesson market. i am now the proud mum of 3 regular privates, with another 4 trial lessons coming up in the next week. i am aiming to try for 10 privates a week. it’s great! cash in hand – between 3000 – 3500 yen per hour, in a relaxed cafe situation, you and your student can plan the curriculum and any texts, you can wear casual clothes and kinda be yourself. very freakin’ pleasant, let me tell you.
by the middle of this month i will have received a truckload of yen from last months overwork insanity – i am up to date in my rent, over half my debts will be gone and i will be able to treat myself to a bit of fun. maybe even go see a movie or 2. AND it looks like the transfer request i made to my evening job (it takes me an hour to get there every day) is about to go through, and the new place is only 20 minutes away.
i have more time on my hands to enjoy these glorious summer days and relax a little. nice. roll on colours of summer.
the catch up
hey folks, long time no speak. sorry i’ve been so slack on the update front. guess i have developed an allergy to my desk and all it’s attachments.
i have been going through employment hell but due some unexpected repercussions to some previous frangipani content i have been reluctant to make comments here about it (and in fact reluctant to blog much at all as it’s not the first time i’ve had unpleasant incidents as a result of innocent blabs on the site). and besides, i had been moaning about jobs for a few months already and goddamn it gets boring reading someone else’s moans.
but you’re gonna cop it anyways. so the cool ALT (assistant language teacher) job i had lined up with the cool little company managed to slide from my grasp after a whole month of postponed, postponed, postponed waiting and a weeks worth of training. seemed they failed to negotiate the finer points of the contract with the board of education for that area. you can imagine how that made me feel. i had not budgeted for a month long holiday and living in inner city tokyo is not the cheapest of living conditions…. so some of my lovely flatties went halves in my rent for me and i hit the job boards again.
it is not a totally tragic situation as about halfway through april i realised that i could not survive any more no-income waiting. i applied to one of those shall-remain-nameless big english conversation school companies for a part time job in the evenings, which i started 3 weeks ago. and to be honest, for all the outlandish myths that circulate japan about these big companies, i have found this one refreshingly professional, fast, upfront and no bullshit – unlike the vast majority of piddling english education companies in tokyo.
i have spent weeks feeling like the star of a bad b-grade movie traipsing from one interview to the next, all over this huge city, on sardine packed trains and in dingy offices listening to appallingly bad english and reading badly written info packs, contracts and outlandish “rules” for teachers.
but last week, i struck a little piece of – temporary – gold. 2 days a week in a prestigious high school in one of my favourite areas: kichijoji, for excellent money. i love everything about this job! the location, the teachers, and most importantly: the kids. i am co-teaching with japanese teachers to 8 different classes in the 10th grade. the classes are huge – up to 45 per class, and it’s really fascinating watching the way the dynamic works with that number of kids. there is still a remarkable sense of order, productivity and respectfulness. a lot of the kids at this school are “returnees” – kids who have lived OS, so the general level of english is quite high. a lot of the returnees love helping out their classmates with grammer and vocab, and having spent time OS they seem to be a lot more switched on than a lot of their peers. i was kinda scared about doing the high school thing, but i have been very pleasantly surprised by the liveliness and fun that both the teachers and kids have in class. really quite a wonderful experience.
anyways, this little piece of gold turns to brass in july and august when the school has it’s big exams and then summer holidays. and i don’t get paid when i don’t teach. so….. i am scrambling together a motley collection of agencies and private classes to try to get me through till september. i really want to teach at this kichijoji school full time, so i’m going to be a model teacher for the next 6 weeks (have even brought home about 90 essays to mark before monday) and hassle them for something full time come september. please keep everything crossed for me. i don’t want to keep working for the factory conversation schools for the rest of my time in japan!
in other news, everything else is hunkydory. my japanese is getting better. and my living situation is very excellent, it’s so nice to have this little family to come home to every day. i always enjoy hearing other peoples stories, and these boys i live with all have very full lives. we spend a lot of time sitting around the kitchen table talking about life and recounting our daily adventures and misadventures. tim went drinking with miss japan last night, dave has a gorgeous boyfriend with whom he is madly in like with and a band that is getting heaps of gigs, gabe is having all sorts of girl/stalker/true love dilemmas, fern is enjoying a large range of date options for the first time in his life – and playing some great gigs, and seth really banged up his ankle at karate training 2 nights ago, poor fella.
been taking truckloads of photos and like i mentioned in the last entry, it’s time to start culling the existing gallery. it’s gonna be tough, it feels like pulling down some of the fujiyoshida photos will be pulling down the links i have to that beautiful time. but it has to happen, we all have to move forward.
now that japan is not all so new to me, i see that my photos are not so much about *japan* any more (sorry all you far away japanophiles). they are photos for the sake of a (hopefully) good image. but by default it is inevitable that most of my photos will be flavoured in some way or another by japan.
i’ve been really impressed with marks photos over at the new look vudeja lately, and my other two fave sites these days are a photo a day and making happy. it breaks my heart to see that mr j has pulled his site my private tokyo down. why, mr j, why?!!!!! anyway, for a list of other photoblog sites that have been rockin my world of late, check out my favourites list at photoblogs. you’ll see a lot of lomo and toy camera sites – i find myself more and more entranced by the dreamy images produced by the toy camera range. and yet at the same time i fantasize about owning a leica digital slr. *drool. oh god damn how i need a full time job again.
ok, time to abandon the computer and make my way over to katherines place in kichijoji for a night of downloaded sex and the city and queer eye for the straight guy. thanks god for fibre optic and cable.
happiness is a junior high graduate
march is hell in the education sector in japan. everyone is insanely busy – doing tests, marking tests, end of school year paperwork & reports, arranging the new school years classes, nandoka nandoka nandoka.
it’s also a damn happy time for those classes receiving their graduation certificates and movin’ on up to the next level.
this is kana, one of my junior high girls at class tonight. she came direct from her graduation ceremony after party. she told me she and her friends cried a lot at the ceremony and that they had taken many photos. but she is very very very happy to be starting senior high school in a few weeks time.
look at that smile. i haven’t seen her smile like that for months.
so what letter of the alphabet are you?
tenzin phentok (second from right) with one of her brothers (left), her mum & dad (centre) and 3 of her 4 uncles, at her house in patlikuhl. the photographer was hunched in the far corner and what you see are the full dimensions of the entire house.
today i received a letter from my sweet little penpal in india. tenzin phentok is a tibetan girl of 14. we met when i travelled to india with her (tibetan) uncle tenzin choegyal and his wife (good friends of mine) back in 2000. choegyal, bronny & i stayed at a nearby guest house while we visited her family’s little one room house in a little town just south of manali, in the himalayan foothills.
it’s time to meet the kids
i have hundreds of hoarded photos of the 100 or so kids i spend every working day with. teaching at a juku (cram school) is kinda cool in that it allows you to develop close bonds with your students – there are never more than 10 kids in any one class. many of my friends in the japanese school system only teach in classrooms of 30 + kids, and mostly act as a human tape recorder for the japanese teacher. they don’t get to know the kids, they just don’t get the chance. part of the reason i’m contemplating staying out here in the countryside is because of my students. i’ll miss them so when i go. so i figured, it’s time for you to meet the kids, in all their halloween glory. first up, kira-chan, my absolute favourite of them all. it seems that bunny ears, fairy princesses and witch hats & broomsticks were the costumes of choice this year.
< img class="graphic" img alt="my all time favourite: kira" src="http://www.frangipani.info/blog/archives/unitas/kira.jpg" width="249" height="333" border="1" />
kids day
sota is 3 years old
he spent an hour running up and down a little hill of leaves
the essential group photo. this is all the full time staff at unitas, some parents and a bunch of our younger kids
we just finshed our meals when the rains came bucketing down…
the delightful old man of the cave. behind him is a white draped curtain. behind that is the cave entrance.
driving home
yesterday we had our annual kids day event – an outdoor activity day for our younger students. this year we headed out to the kawaguchiko field centre. on the agenda was some open fire cooking of rice and curry (in 5 separate groups), then a bush walk to the local craft centre for a craft session making things from natural objects like wood and twigs, etc. all followed by a cave walk in a lava tunnel. all great in theory if you have a fine day.
but in the strangest weather patterns i have seen in one single day in japan, we experienced
1. the unexpected morning delights of a hot sun,
2. the heady adrenalin rush of gale-force winds,
3. the miserable drama of torrential rains
4. back to completely unexpected warm sun – all in the space of about 6 hours. which made our day quite….erm….unforgettable…
the open fire cooking went well, the sing-along was drowned out by the noise of the rain on the shelter roof – not to mention the astonishing loss of visibility as the light vanished behind dense black cloud… we ditched the bushwalk and opted for soggy dashes to the cars to ferry the kids to the craft centre. miraculously, the rains eased as quickly as they came, lasting only an hour or so, so we were able to do the lava tunnel walk.
living at the base of a volcano can be very interesting, i have been in 2 lava tunnels now. these tunnels are made when lava drowns a big forest with big trees. the trees decay into nothing after a long period of time, leaving nothing but long tunnels that criss-cross up and down in long straight sections. often they are very small, you have to do a kind of duckwalk through, they are often very wet so crawling isn’t an option unless you have wet weather leggings.
this cave was made even more interesting by the talk we received from the caretaker. an elderly man with a wry sense of humour and gruff delivery. he had the kids enthralled and everyone laughing as he explained how the tunnel was made. this particular tunnel has been turned into a shrine and the entrance is covered with a small temple building. inside there was a shrine sitting at the end of a tunnel, in a small pond of water. very cool.
calamity strikes
over the weekend i had the brilliant idea to download some cool movie trailers and clips, and take my laptop to class and use the trailers as part of my lessons. so i downloaded the new “lord of the rings: the return of the king” trailer and packed up my computer and headed off to class with it today, feelin’ pretty cocky. i showed it to each class, the kids were all thrilled and quite fascinated… good move. they asked lots of questions – not just about the movie but also about the computer and computers in general.
leaving the laptop on sleep, i just opened the lid every new class and viola! the movie was showing in seconds. i was most excited about showing the clip to my adult class tonight, they are all movie buffs and regularly head off to shinjuku or kofu to check out the latest films. minutes before their class i lifted the lid on my baby and went out to greet them….
when goddamned CALAMITY struck!!!!
on my return, a big nasty black screen with a small blue window. “hardware malfunction. complete system failure. see your service provider”
holy s**t……*
crap……*******
bloody muddaf****r………….
every other filthy dirty expletive known to a pub-going australian SCREAMED through my head (all the while maintaining my sweet polite english teacher in japan facade in front of my extremely polite middle aged students).
i quietly hit the off button (which surprisingly worked) and shut the computer down. not surprisingly i immediately lost all interest in the lesson, my students, and showing them the LOTR trailer…. the hour dragged through like eternity as i corrected sloppy pronunication of “really”, “rooms”, “refrigerator”, “live”…. the clock seemed to sit on 8:40 for an hour and a half…. as images flashed through my head of a life without a computer.
driving home in the cold car, teeth chattering, i tried to keep calm and controlled. got back to work, parked the car, quietly said my otsukare sama-deshta’s and walked home at a nice even pace… all the while imagining this life without my baby. sure, i could get through the pile of books by my bed, i could start studying japanese again… but…. no immediate contact with my friends and family… no playing with my photos (why the hell didn’t someone tell me earlier about saturation and the unsharp mask?)… no watching the ABC news or rage from home… no checking out what fellow bloggers around the world are up to…. no access to my MP3′s… no researching whatever topic takes my fancy on the spur of the moment…. oh mi god, i could see my entire next paycheque all going to correct this desperately unfair and barren situation…
the key turned in the door, in 6 strides i was at the desk, baby out, all connected, sighing, my heart full of dread, i hit the on button and stepped back to watch, ready to sink to the floor and start howling.
i watched. first screen up, ok. then a blinking white dash.
blink.
blink.
blink.
goodamn, hurry up, i’m about to die here!
blink.
“welcome to windows XP”.
eyes closed in thankful relief, i vowed to never take my laptop to class again.
