9 Reasons I Loved or Hated Being an English Teacher in Japan

As of Friday I am officially an ex-Assistant Language Teacher. It's a weird feeling to think about how I will never again walk the halls of a Japanese public high school, and maybe even never walk the halls of a school ever again. I was an ALT for four years, and in those four years I taught in three different locations at over 15 different schools. I have taught toddlers and I have taught teenagers. I've run classes by myself and stood in the back for 50 minutes doing nothing but trying to stay awake. I think I have a pretty well-rounded grasp of the process of being an English teacher overseas, so I wanted to share what I consider the best and worst parts of the job.

♡ The Students Constantly Compliment You

I wasn't born with a huge ego, I don't think I am awesome, beautiful, or too witty. Most of my humor and jokes comes from the awkward moments that pepper my life and I have struggled with body image for most of my life. Being an ALT in Japan, however, has really, really given me a lot in terms of self-confidence.

When I started teaching at 22 I was always the youngest teacher around, and even at 26 I am still really young and often the youngest teacher in the school. Add this to the fact that I am extremely pale with blue eyes and curly hair and Japanese girls fawn all over me. The secretive whispers of "wow, look at how blue Kaley's eyes are" and "she's so white" definitely are nice ego boosts.

Confessions of love from boys is common, I change my usual hairstyle and it is met with choruses of "oh how cute!" all day long. I wear contacts after weeks of glasses and it's like I'm a supermodel. My name sounds very similar to Katy Perry, so I am often compared to the gorgeous singer since we're both similar in complexion and eyes.

X There's Often A Lot Of Downtime

Now, this one varies a lot based on your location and how many schools you have. The more schools you have, the less downtime you will have. But in my experience you generally have at least one or two hours a day with no classes scheduled, and once you get the hang of making lessons and preparing supplies for those lessons you realize how much free time you have. My ability to read over 50 books in a year is largely due to just how much I am not doing anything, at all, at work.

Elementary school is generally busier, as you're the full teacher 9 times out of 10 and there's just more elementary schools so you are likely to have more schools. And the lessons are usually very high energy and take a lot out of you. Junior high, on the other hand, is usually way more low-key. What you do is largely dependent on what the Japanese teacher who teaches the class wants you to do. You'll have teachers that want you to teacher full lessons, you'll have teachers who want you to do half, you'll have teachers that just want you to read from the textbook and stand in the back most of the class.

I personally prefer the more demanding and busy elementary school over the more relaxed junior high school. I don't enjoy having hours a day with nothing to do. I had schools where I was at 40 hours a week and only did 8 hours of actual demanding work a day (actively teaching or preparing lessons). The rest was spent sitting at my desk or twiddling my thumbs in class.

♡ You Get to Try Many New Foods

If you choose to eat school lunch (and you really should!) you'll be exposed to a lot of new foods that you likely wouldn't eat otherwise. I learned about so many new foods that I now love. I've posted before about my weird food anxiety, and Japanese school lunches really helped me in overcoming a lot of my anxiety issues.

While the lunches are generally very high in carbs, the dishes are usually interesting. Now, this largely depends on your school lunch centers. I've lived in places with VERY redundant menus (miso soup three days a week with fish!) and I've changed schools so often in a week that I've had four days of noodles in a row since Japanese school lunches are generally designed with one day of noodles, one day of bread, and three of rice in a week.

X Eating With Students in Junior High

Okay, I know I just said school lunch was awesome but the experience of eating with students is often very... depressing. Especially with junior high schoolers. In an effort to provide more interaction time with students the Board of Education has this great idea to make the ALTs eat with students. Students eat lunch in their classroom with the homeroom teacher, and the teachers without homerooms eat in the staff room. I've actually had a school or two where the extra teachers eat with classes, but usually the ALT is the only teacher forced to sit within a group of students and eat alongside them. 

Younger kids usually like this, but the older ones view your presence as an intrusion. If you're the type of person to just push through the awkward "what do I do with this foreigner sitting here?" vibes from students and force them to talk to you, this won't apply to you. I'm not this person. I've even had a boy I was supposed to sit next to refuse to sit next to me because I am foreign and sit at the front next to the homeroom teacher to get away from me, and the next time I was in the class and seated by him he forced a friend to eat next to me.

Usually it's just silence. I sit there and try to eat as much as I can in 15 minutes and the students try to convince each other to talk to me. If I eat in the staff room, which has happened at some schools, I get a relaxing thirty minutes to eat my lunch and relax. I much prefer the latter.

♡ Your Japanese Listening Skills Will Get Really Good

Since everyone at school speaks Japanese at a native level around you all day, you'll quickly learn how to listen to Japanese conversations really well. You can just sit at your desk and listen to conversations around you during your free time and learn a lot of very handy Japanese.

If you're doing nothing in a class and the teacher is explaining grammar, you can learn too! I did this often just standing in the back and paying attention to the grammar lesson, trying to make sense of the language from a backwards perspective. I'd even grab an extra worksheet the kids were doing and write along with it.

You can also learn kanji by just looking around the room and seeing what they are using, as it's usually pretty basic. 

X You're Often Not Taken Seriously

Since you're a teacher with very little responsibility it's very common for no one to really take you seriously. You'll be out of the loop for many things and you'll have very little control over how things are taught. You're told what to do and you do it how they ask. While some teachers may value your input as a foreigner with a different perspective, most will just want you to do what they ask of you.

This is also a good thing, because you'll have lower expectations for things and can easily feign ignorance in many situations. They don't expect a lot of you so your responsibilities are low. While this is great for a while it leads to the job not feeling very serious, as there's really very little motivation to be better at it unless it all comes from within yourself, and at times the job can be very unrewarding because you'll get very little praise or feedback on your performance. If you work for a contracting company the schools are literally prevented by law to give your company any sort of feedback on your performance at work. Yeah, they can complain about you but they can't actually say anything productive to what you do.

This fact leads to your job seeming very unimportant in the grand scheme of things to most people, I've found. Unless you have that great self-motivation to be good, you won't be. You have to want to make good lessons and that's what ultimately makes someone good at this job. And it just got to the point with me that I no longer had that motivation, which is why I quit!

♡ You Get to See the "Real" Japan

By being an ALT you are actually in a Japanese public school. Almost every Japanese person went through this system and you become very aware of a lot of things that make Japan what it is. You get to see Japanese people in their natural environment, and not out in public or in a specific setting geared towards foreigners.

I studied Japanese culture in college and I really enjoyed just being able to ask questions about certain things and learn about how a Japanese school works. It's very different from American schools and made a lot of aspects of Japanese culture make sense to me. I learned to appreciate things that had frustrated me in the beginning.

X You Will Just Be An "ALT"

In the staff room I rarely heard teachers refer to me by my name, usually I was just referred to as "ALT". "The ALT is leaving early today" or "The ALT is eating lunch with this class". My shoebox in the school entry is rarely labeled with my name, but just "ALT" whereas all the other teachers have a name there. 

On the program for the closing ceremony at my school nearly two weeks back it just said "ALT" next to the goodbye speech section whereas every other teacher had their name written. I'm sure this isn't meant as a slight to me, but it's insanely frustrating to be nothing but those three letters to people you work with on a daily basis. I was at these schools every day for months as well, so it wasn't like I wasn't a permanent fixture. 

X Teachers are Usually Afraid to Approach You

Since most teachers have very little grasp of English conversation they are nervous to talk to you. This is understandable. They don't not want to talk to you, and I've never been treated poorly by a teacher. Whenever I do add something to a conversation it is usually very encouraged, it's just hard because teachers often won't go out of their way to approach you.

On the other hand those teachers who do enjoy English will be all over you, but those are few and far between. Older ladies are generally the nicest, whereas older men want nothing to do with you. At least if you're a female. I imagine if you're a guy it's opposite.

This can often lead to you feeling lonely when everyone is talking and you're just sitting there hoping to understand Japanese to say something. Teachers are also often very busy so it may be hard to find the time to approach a teacher. Out of all the "bad" issues on this list, this is probably the least bad, but some people may not like the isolation of being the only person not included in things.

3 Ways Japanese Junior HIgh Schools Are Different

Now that I've spent well over a year teaching junior high school in Sapporo I believe I have a firm grasp on how this level of schooling works in Japan. Overall, school is school. Students come and they learn lessons from people who know better than they do and it hopefully shapes them into good, productive members of society. It goes without saying that Japanese and American society are very different, but many of the values are the same and that reflects in the schooling. There are, however, areas in which large differences occur.

1. The Students

Kids will be kids, and that rings true when comparing Japanese and American junior high students. In Japan, junior high encompasses what we would consider 7^th to 9^th grade. That means the students are roughly 12 to 15 years old. I actually have a number of cousins which fall in this age bracket, so it’s a generation I am very comfortable with being around. Their interests are similar, watching television shows, shopping with friends, playing sports, etc. Japanese students are just a bit different in certain areas.

In Japan greetings are a big deal. You greet every time you see someone, always. When shopping you will walk past stores to ear piercing calls of “いらっしゃいませ!” (irrashaimase) which is a greeting said in the hopes of beckoning you into their fantastically friendly store. It’s something that every foreigner quickly learns to tune out in their daily life. Greetings at work and school are similar to this. In the mornings the hallways are filled with “Good morning!” shouted at you from every angle and ignoring a greeting is a major offense. Before class starts everyone is called to attention to formally greet the teacher (some classes just say “let’s begin” casually while others will stand, bow, and thank you for coming). Often I’ll see written for the daily goal of a class to have “really energetic greetings!” This is something I know I never cared about as a student, but it is something I will see posters about at schools in Japan.

Another way Japanese students differ is that nearly all of them are in some sort of afterschool activity. They are on a sports team or in the art club or they go to juku (after school intensive lessons). These clubs meet on a daily basis in most cases and are extremely time consuming and require an immense amount of dedication. When I was a student I wasn't in any club, at least not seriously, and I don’t really think any of my friends were. There was an afterschool center in the lunchroom where I waited with my friends while our parents worked, but it wasn't an actual club, more a glorified babysitter.

2. The School Year

Japanese schools function year-round. The school year starts in April, a little over a week after the previous one ended. This was very strange when I first moved to Japan as a week vacation didn't feel long enough to transition from being one grade to the next. There is another three weekish long break in August where many people travel and airlines tickets are insanely expensive, and a final break in winter that is two to three weeks depending on where you live (it’s longer in the tundra that is Hokkaido, which makes me very happy).

Because they go to school all year, they spend more time at school. When I first started teaching in junior high I was shocked at just how much time was spent not learning. Currently my school is preparing for the chorus contest to be held at the end of the month, for the last three weeks every sixth period has been spent practicing for it. That’s nearly a month of them missing a class every day. The latter half of September was spent preparing for the school festival after lunch. Because they don’t have that large summer break, they have the time to do these things that I never got to do in school.

They also learn a wider range of subjects consistently. When I was in junior high (middle school) I studied math, science, social studies, language arts, band and an elective that changed in the middle of the year. These electives varied between home economics, art, wood shop, etc. In Japan the students study science, social studies, English, home economics, music, art, language arts, and P.E. as well as classes called “moral education”, “class activities”, and “period for integrated studies”. Due to this, their schedules are different from day to day. First period Monday may be science but you’ll have science again Tuesday during fourth period. It is a lot of juggling and I see Japanese teachers often confused by where they are supposed to be at what time.

3. Classrooms

One of the things I was most excited about when I started middle school back in 2000

 was that I would be changing classes every hour. It felt so grown up to carry around all of my books in my backpack and manage my schedule, making sure that I got to class on time with the three minute break I had. Teachers decorated their classrooms to match the subject they were teaching, bulletin boards covered in maps and items from around the world in social studies, science classrooms filled with animals we took care of, different rules of writing posted up in language arts. I felt immersed in the subject I was studying.

In contrast, Japanese students spend their entire day in one classroom. Their classroom. As a teacher I have to lug everything I need all over the school all day long, and the students are in the same small classroom for hours. They have a ten minute break between classes (which teachers spend trying to grab what they need for the next class and sit down for five minutes before heading to the next classroom). While you don’t get the same benefits I mentioned above, the fact that the students are in the same class with the same people all day instills a sense of comradery and feelings of having your own space to be proud of that I never had in school.

Students eat their lunches in the classroom, often breaking into predetermined groups and eating together. They decorate the classrooms themselves with posters that they make during the “class activities” class I mentioned before. They clean the classrooms (barely…). They even keep the same desk and chair all three years, moving it from classroom to classroom.

These are just a few of the ways Japanese schools are different. I hope you enjoyed it and I would love to hear about how your schooling varied from anything I talked about! What do you think about Japanese students staying in the same classroom all day? Do you think year round schooling is better? Do you wish that greetings and afterschool activities were more forced upon students? Let me know!

First Day At School Fourteen

First, I'd like to start by apologizing for not updating in over a week. The weather in Hokkaido has gotten cold, which means I have gotten a cold. For the last week I've just not felt well and have spent much of my free time sleeping due to sinus headaches. Yay!

I know I have a Part II to my last post to write up, but honestly it still makes me sad to think about leaving that last school so I would rather post about this. Plus, I think this may be more interesting. Maybe.

In Sapporo, the board of education has us change schools halfway in the year, so from May to September I am at one school and then October to March I am at another school. It's a very stressful, depressing time because leaving schools is depressing and starting a new school is stressful. This year was no different. I left my previous school on a Tuesday and then started at a new school on a Wednesday (all while fighting off the beginnings of a cold). It was very, very hard for me to leave this last school, as I'd been there for a year - October 2013 to September 2014 - and it was honestly one of the best schools I have ever gone to. Needless to say, my first day was going to be a rough one.

My shoe locker in the entry

This was only amplified by me making what is perhaps the most annoying mistake anyone in my position can make. I had forgotten my indoor shoes. So, in Japanese schools everyone is required to change out of the shoes that they wore to school into clean "indoor shoes". This is done for a number of reasons that I don't feel like getting into at the moment. If you're curious I suggest reading this. Due to my forgetfulness, it meant I was to spend my entire first day in awfully uncomfortable slippers provided by the school. These are generally small with zero padding and live up to the "slip" part of "slippers" very, very well.

Per my contract, I don't have to be at school for the morning meeting (which usually happens thirty minutes before first period) but on the first day the principal wants to introduce me to the teachers and staff. This means that I am usually sequestered in the principal's office for twenty minutes trying to come up with some sentences in Japanese to impress my new coworkers all whilst fighting back my nerves and making awkward small talk with the principal.

This principal, however, wanted to interview me. He began by asking if I was from Orlando, Florida. After I said that I am he told me about how his daughter had been there, and then asked me about Disney, Universal, and the Kennedy Space Center. Once that was out of the way, he asked me about my history teaching in Japan, mainly confirming what my company had given him. Then the questions about Japan started: "What Japanese food do you like?" "How are America and Japan different?" "What surprised you about Japan?" etc.

This entire conversation was done in both English and Japanese, and once he felt he had enough information on me he told me how his son is living in Canada and then stood up to show me something on his phone. It was a picture of his dog, a miniature dachshund, which is his "best friend". Then, he pretended to be a dog. At this point I honestly thought that maybe I hadn't woken up yet and was in the middle of some strange stress-dream.

The introduction to the staff went well, I had decided to plan ahead on my welcome speech and written something in Japanese the week before, which got me many compliments from my new coworkers. My morning, however, was still very stressful. I had to give my first lesson during first period, which gave me very little time to unpack or prepare or adjust or really do anything. I also had to give a speech on TV to students, which lead to a gaggle of third year boys crammed in the staff room doorway to get a good look at me as I left the broadcasting room.

It had been a while since I had started a new school and I'd forgotten just how much attention my appearance garners. The entire day was filled with groups of boys or girls following me down the hallways trying to convince each other to talk to me. Eventually a boy would muster up enough courage and introduce himself to me, which would lead to a good five minutes of me answering questions about myself, normally in the vein of if I'm single or not, how tall I am, and what my age is.

Worksheet I use during my introduction

The lessons themselves went well enough, the first day was just second years, and at that age (13 and 14) the students vary quite a lot in regards to how interesting they find me. Overall, the English level at this school is quite high and the students are much better at listening than my prior second years, so it was already an improvement. I am also required at this school to eat lunch with the students, which is a mixed bag in most cases, especially at the beginning when the students aren't used to me. I could (and most likely will) write an entire post about eating with students, so I won't go into too many details other than to say that eating with students is usually just me sitting quietly trying to shove food in my mouth for the ten minutes I am given to eat.

There's really not much else to say at this point. I'm still adjusting to the new school, having finished all of my self-introduction lessons this past Tuesday. Usually once I get through an actual English lesson with each class I finally feel at ease, as I know what to expect. Overall, I think I'll enjoy this school. The teachers seem really good and friendly, and the students are engaged and good at listening (so far). I've honestly yet to have a "bad school" in Japan, so I feel very lucky and I'm really not even sure they exist.

I'll try to get another post up Monday or Tuesday, as it's a long weekend (health and sports day, wooo!). Hope you have a wonderful day!

My desk! It's small :(

I've also added this post to the Lotus Collective Daily Diaries. You can see more posts there!

A Japanese School Festival, Part 1: The Lengthy Opening Ceremony

This past Friday was the annual school festival at the junior high school where I have taught at for the last year. Last year (at a different school) was my first time experiencing this aspect of Japanese culture, and it was a very interesting insight into the differences between Japanese and American junior high school life.

For nearly the entire month of September students have been preparing for this festival. From students designing and submitting their own "symbol marks" (a logo to represent the year's festival) to spending hours after school and during preparing decorations for the classrooms, there isn't a student that doesn't have a hand in helping this event come together.

My current school's festival differed in a number of ways from my last, so each school clearly has their own take on the event. Talking with friends who also teach in junior high verified this, in that some schools have festivals lasting multiple days whereas both of the ones I attended only lasted one. Some don't even include some of the same components as the two I went to, and others add other activities. Universally, it is a time for the students to show off their artistic and creative abilities over a variety of different media outlets.

From last year's school festival

The week prior to the festival I stayed late helping students make decorations for their classroom. I painted a few doors, glued some eggshells, and helped make a house. It was such a nice way to spend some of the final days at this school. It is rare that I get to talk with students in such a relaxed fashion, and seeing their personalities outside of the classroom is something that I always enjoy. The day prior to the festival was spend solely in preparation so I was given the day off of work. It was awesome to come to school the day of and see everything finished. The kids were also very excited, so their energy was better than any coffee for a morning pick-me-up.

The festival itself begins in the gym. Every grade will give a performance of a play their class had written. Each class would have submitted a play and then the best one from each grade is chosen to perform. Another (first year) class is then given control of the opening ceremony.

Japan loves ceremonies. I have been to countless of them now and I am always impressed at just how much effort goes into them, even if the reason for having it seems rather simple or mundane to me. Walking into the gym all of the classes are sitting in the center; boys to the left, girls to the right. The constant separation of genders in this country is something that I'm still not completely used to. There is a huge white tarp covering the 3 square meter "symbol mark", which is to be seen by everyone during the opening ceremony for the first time. Scattered around are exactly 65 chairs for parents, guests, and teachers to sit in. Most of these will be filled by PTA moms and  maybe three fathers or grandfathers. The lack of parental involvement in these school functions is something that always makes me feel a bit sad, but these activities are done for the students, not their mothers and/or fathers.

The "symbol mark"

The ceremony began with a brief history of the school's "symbol marks" at past festivals and I was left feeling a little perplexed at the importance of it. To me, it's just a logo, but to the students it is something more. Something I'll never understand as I am not a Japanese student. After the slideshow there is a countdown to the reveal of the "symbol mark". A  few students cut the strings holding up the tarp, which falls down to reveal what, I must admit, to be a really impressive banner with an amazingly done 3D symbol. After everyone cheers and fawns over how great the logo looks, the creator of the "symbol mark" is called to the stage to accept a certificate from the student body president and give a speech about her inspiration behind creating the logo.

There is then a slideshow of the various classes preparing for the festival which, I would learn later, is the Song-Of-The-Festival. I cannot tell you what it was, but I am pretty sure I heard it fifty times over the course of the day in both standard and music box varieties. Finally, the class who prepared the opening ceremony sings a song and does a dance that involves a lot of organized clapping (which the rest of the school hilariously tries to clap along with). It was equal parts cute, strange and emotionless. But, I guess I really can't expect much else from seven graders.

Once the song is finished the attention is directed towards the Super Smash Bros party ball (くす玉 Kusudama, or medicine ball) hanging over the students which then opens and a huge banner that says "begin the school festival" unfurls from inside and the kids are showered in confetti. There is cheering and everyone is excited for it to finally begin. Even though we've all been sitting in the gym for thirty minutes and will continue to sit there for the next two plus hours watching performances.

Due to the length this has gotten, I've decided to split this blog post into two parts. Part two will include a brief summary of the performances and my thoughts on them, the way in which the schools were decorated, the band performance and the not-nearly-as-long-as-the-opening-ceremony closing ceremony.

The Teacher

Since I've had over a dozen schools, I have had the chance to interact with many different kinds of teachers. Some of them have been a pleasure to teach with; giving me control during class and just having a great attitude towards me being in the classroom. They essentially become students themselves, especially if they are elementary school teachers as they almost always don't know any English. On the other hand some can bit a bit difficult to work with, mainly in the sense that they have problems trusting that the students will understand what it is I am trying to teach them which leads to issues giving up control.

Thankfully, I've never had huge issues with a teacher and very few teachers actually fall into that latter type above. I have had, however, one teacher that turned me into a puerile school girl.

He taught at one of my first schools as a third grade elementary school teacher. I was twenty-two years old and he was likely well into his thirties. He was handsome, with a smile that you knew was genuine. His hair was utterly fantastic and he always dressed really, really well (which is rare for elementary school teachers). He also really loved being a teacher. Every time I taught his class he would join in the games with the same enthusiasm as his students. Seeing him interact with them just turned me into a huge pile of goo. I was putty in his hands.

Me, roughly third grade. Maybe.

I never seriously thought about pursuing anything with this teacher. The conflict of interest alone was too much for me to handle. But boy, did my heart flutter every time I saw his name on an upcoming schedule.

There were a couple of instances that I still remember of him just capturing that thirteen-year-old-girl part of me. I had shown up to school with my hair tied up in a bun atop my head. At that point I was still in the habit of really caring about how I looked at school. Not that I don't care currently, I was just more concerned with looking cute than being comfortable during the day. That meant wearing my hair down almost daily regardless of the fact that I would spend just as much time pushing my curls from my face as I would spend teaching. But I was cute doing it, and that’s all that had mattered. Now, my hair almost always sits in a messy bun on my head while I am teaching. But I am comfortable and that, truly, is all that matters; especially when the teacher's room is nearly thirty degrees Celsius.

So, it was a rare day of me wearing my hair up. I can't really remember having a reason for it, just that for that day I had decided to wear it up. The third grade teacher walked in during break time and just stopped and looked at me. His English was worse than my Japanese so our communication was always a little awkward. After a few seconds of silence he finally said, "You hair," while using his hands to simulate stroking an invisible ponytail resting on his shoulder, "it's nice…like," then pretending to push all of the imagined hair onto the top of his head. Clearly, he was trying to say that my hair looked good when it was up in a bun. This, in my mind, was the equivalent of the popular boy at school giving my glasses-wearing, braces-having, frizzy-hair-sporting thirteen-year-old self a compliment.

I am pretty sure I just smiled awkwardly and said, "Thanks," in English.

And then he walked off silently.

After that he stepped up his "game". In class he would always say how the students really looked forward to my lessons. He would consistently look up phrases in English so that he could communicate with me and even started to tote around a Japanese-English dictionary. Every time I went to that school my crush on him would grow and grow. I'd never had a guy act in such a way around me. I still don't think I have ever been treated in such a fashion by another guy.

It all climaxed when I had lunch in his classroom for the last time. Eating with students is always a mixed bag. Sometimes it is fantastic, the kids are excited and try to engage with you in conversation and you become closer with the students. On the other hand, you can get put with students who just sit there in awkward silence, scared to even look at you or speak in Japanese. This third grade class was always fantastic thankfully.

I had crammed myself into one of their tiny, third-grader-sized desks with my knees out to the side and bent up taller than the desk itself. The kids are all lively and talking with me, clearly excited that I am there to eat lunch with them. They all finish their food rather quickly and sit down.

Silence.

The teacher pulls out a piece of paper and reads, "We have made you a present." Then he pulls out a guitar.

Yes, a guitar.

He starts playing it and the entire class bursts into a very well-rehearsed song. I just sit there grinning like an idiot. There is really nothing else you can do in that situation, is there? What the song was, I'll never know. It was all in Japanese and the tune was vaguely similar to a Beatles song. I honestly have zero idea what it was they were singing about.

The goodbye pizza gifts

Nothing ever happened with that teacher and I can't even remember his name anymore. The time before my last visit to that school he came over with his memo pad that I had grown to recognize and read, "What is your favorite food?" from the pages.

This time I didn't turn into a teen aged girl and simply replied, "Pizza," which he wrote down in the notepad and walked off.

On my last day at that school he came over to be just before I left and handed me a bag. Inside were various snacks, all of them flavored "pizza".

First Days

As a child the First Day of School always did a number on my nerves. All through elementary and middle school I would spend that first morning hanging my head in a toilet bowl. I didn't really have a reason to be anxious; I loved school. I never got bad grades, I had plenty of friends, and I was never bullied outside of standard teasing. Yet for some reason that first day always go to me. It was a ritual.

After moving to Japan I found that First Day Anxiety didn't disappear just because the student had become the teacher. During the past three years I've had 13 First Days and the anxiety still gets to me. Thankfully, I no longer spend the morning with my toilet, but I don't sleep and I go throughout the day light-headed thanks to an ever-racing heart.

Driving into the town

When I moved to Japan to teach English in public schools I had absolutely zero experience in teaching. Unless you count a very brief stint as a math tutor in high school as "teaching". I'd gotten my degree in International Affairs and made Japanese culture my main focus so. culturally speaking. I was pretty well prepared for my life abroad.

Honestly, the teaching isn't that difficult. I don't plan a curriculum nor do I hand out grades. My main role is to just play games and speak English with the students. I am a glorified clown that helps Japanese students get adjusted to the idea of "foreigners" in a very homogeneous society. I had less than a week of training before I was sent to my first small Japanese city that was nestled on the coast of Western Honshu; and a lot of that time wasn't even spent focusing on how to teach but rather how to live in Japan and company related information.

In that first city I had seven schools; five elementary and two junior high. That meant I had seven different First Days over the course of about a month. That first First Day, however, will always stick out in my mind for various reasons, both good and bad. But mainly good.

I was 22 years old, living on my own means for the first time. I'd just graduated from college four months prior so the "grown-up" life was still something I wasn't used to. My first school was small, The entire elementary school consisted of exactly twenty-five kids. The school itself was located high in the mountains of Yamaguchi Prefecture. As a girl who had lived her entire life up to that point in the flat-lands of Florida, the drive alone filled me with a since of awe and wonder and left me feeling very small.

After a fifteen minute drive up winding mountain roads the trees cleared and I found myself looking down on something that I had only seen in movies: rice fields nearing full bloom stretched out before me, dotted with houses covered in beautiful tiled roofs of royal blue and emerald green all split with tiny, one-lane roads. Any sense of anxiety I had was briefly forgotten because it was just really, really pretty.

New Years cards from the second grade class

The school itself had only three classes of students. There was a second grade class, a third and fourth grade class, and a fifth and sixth grade class. On each of my visits to the school I would see each one of them. Much to my surprise, the second grade teacher spoke English really well, which wasn't something I expected in a small mountain town. All of the teachers were extremely nice to me. At the time, my Japanese wasn't that great. I had studied it for two years in college, but my listening skills were seriously lacking. Yet, their kindness made it so I never felt alienated. There would be a cup of coffee siting on my desk in the morning, and they would always offer me fresh vegetables from the garden the school grew or fruit they had just picked from a tree outside.

My company had emailed me the lesson plans for my First Day a few days before, and I had spent a few hours at home the previous week preparing everything. I was to teach each class in ascending order, so the second graders were to be my first ever class in Japan.

The class consisted of five students; three boys and two girls. They sat in a tiny classroom, in a row of tiny desks, wearing tearing uniforms, and I had a tiny platform to stand on in front of the blackboard. There was a large TV in the corner next to a fish tank. The back wall of the classroom was lined with cubbies that hinted at a time when there were far more than twenty-five students enrolled at the school. Pictures hung over the cubbies pinned into a cork-board that stretched the length of the entire back wall. Every classroom I would teach in would have a similar appearance.

I gave a brief introduction of myself after the class began, thrown slightly off-balance by the standard way in which a Japanese class starts. One student calls for attention, informing the students of what class and/or period it is, then the student instructs the students to bow and give a greeting to the teacher. The string of fast-paced Japanese was nearly incomprehensible to me and it took me months to discern the meaning of it because I was too embarrassed to ask.

Once I'd finished my introduction I began the actual lesson. The students were enthusiastic and tried their best. There is one part, however, that I will always remember.

One of the boys had a bit of a problem. I assume he was given a lot of power at home and rarely heard the word "no". As the class progressed this boy slowly started moving his desk back towards the cubbies. He wanted nothing to do with English class. The homeroom teacher (HRT) handled it well. After he had gone back as far as he could she knelt beside him, whispering something I couldn't hear into his ear. Regardless of her efforts he just sat in the back glowering at me. It was a little unnerving.

Goodbye present from the second graders

My second class started in the same fashion as the first. This class was a bit larger at about twelve students, and each of the students were great. The entire lesson went over without a hitch. It wasn't until I had returned to the teachers' room to prepare for my final lesson of the day that I had learned that I'd actually done the lesson intended for the fifth and sixth graders. I don't believe anyone ever brought up the mistake to me or my company.

The fifth and sixth grade class was also great. Their HRT loved to teach them English and each student stood up and gave me an introduction of themselves. At the end of the day my anxiety had almost entirely disappeared and I realized that these lessons were quite low-pressure and even if I do mess up or have difficult students, as long as the students enjoyed my lessons no one seemed to care.

As far as First Days are concerned, I honestly couldn't ha
ve asked for much more. Event he little second grade boy who spent the entire first lesson trying to get as far away as possible from me would change over the course of the following seven months. When his class would come to get me from the teachers' room he went from standing silent against the back wall of the hallway to being the first to open the door and shout my name and would talk with me the entire walk to his classroom. During class he went from being dead silent to volunteering more than any of the other four students. Watching his attitude change over the months I taught him was probably the most impactful thing that has happened as I've been a teacher, for it showed me the influence my being in the classroom could have and the good things that I could bring to Japan.