KONNICHIWHAT!?: Parent Observations

During my first week teaching at the Usuki school, I started the week off with a bang by getting off at the wrong stop. Turns out that I needed to get off at the Kami-Usuki train stop and not the plain ol' Usuki stop. As you can imagine, this is not an ideal way to start off the work week, especially as a new employee. I immediately called the Japanese teacher at the Usuki school to let her know and then followed up with my boss to let him know what was going on. Luckily, there was a train arriving shortly and I would just hop back on and go back one stop. This threw my schedule off a bit, as I was trying to get to the school early for preparations and this was doing my first week teaching, which was also a week of parent observations. As a side note, let me just say that it is beyond my comprehensive as to why a company would place a brand new employee in a position of company representative when he or she has had little to no teaching experience. If I were a parent, I would wonder what the hell was going on and who this person teaching my kid was. The mind boggles, but I digress. So as I got back on the train headed for my actual stop, I asked this older lady if I was getting on the right train. She informed me that I was and even double-checked with the conductor just to be sure. I thanked her and she was quite curious to my situation. She asked if I were an English teacher (something about the way I looked that day must've implied as much...or maybe it's just a given when a foreigner is spotted), and I told her indeed that I was. She then offered me a piece of fruit and sweet pastry of some sort and told me, "Gambatte kudasai", which is like, "Go for it", or "Do your best", in English. Wow, how about that for a friendly gesture. It really did lift my spirits after realizing I'd gotten off at the wrong stop and immediately put me back in a motivated mood. Moral of this story: do something nice for someone. Just kidding, you don't have to, but it was cool all the same.

So the parent observation thing, while sounding completely intimidating and ultimately illogical for newbies in my opinion...still, it went alright for the most part. I found that the parents are mostly friendly and are rooting for you as much as you're rooting for yourself and they realize that you're working your tail off to corral and basically entertain their kids. Of course you have those few parents who are sitting in the back chatting or playing on their cellphones because they're there more out of obligation than interest, but it was mostly a painless experience. I made it through P.O.'s unscathed and at least I'll know what to expect when the next P.O's roll around come January and February. Yeah, that soon.