KONNICHIWHAT!?: One Week Down

Here am I, chillin' on a Sunday after putting week one of parent observations in the finished column. I told you guys in my last post that I was going to be dealing with P.O.'s this month and I just wrapped up a week at my Usuki school. As I predicted, it was a lot easier on me this time than it was when I first started and got thrown in P.O.'s right away. I knew what to expect and I've gotten used to seeing a majority of these parents whenever I'm sending their kids off at the end of the lesson. The only thing that made me anxious was that I have a few classes with some difficult children. My biggest concern is having a kid act up and the parents eyeballing me to handle it. It's a delicate thing to discipline someone's child in front of them. However, here in Japan you're expected to be the boss and disciplinarian in the classroom...even if the parents are watching. Most of the time the parents won't do anything to discipline their children in a classroom environment and rarely say anything. They believe that the classroom is your (the teacher) domain and it's up to you to run things properly. That's a weird switch to flip in my American brain. Some parents have told me to go ahead and smack their kids in the head if they act up, and all I can think is, "back home, that's a lawsuit". So it's a mental exercise for sure. Back to my school specifically, most of my classes went well and the Colorado quiz that I had prepared for the students to take with their parents went over quite well. They enjoyed taking the quiz together and the kids really got excited if they answered something correctly. The only class that made me sweat heavily was on Thursday. This particular class has about 12 students and requires me to set up 4 tables. Believe me, this is a large class and it's rare to have numbers this high. It is the way it is though and with the parents there, it was a packed house. There's a large number of boys in this class who love rough-housing and even though they were more well-behaved than normal, they were doing a bit of pushing and shoving at one point and I knew all eyes were on me. I had to stop the activity we were doing in order to separate them, but afterwards, order was restored. This class had me sweating because it's so big and it's difficult to keep an eye on everything, but the trick is just to conduct your lesson as usual and act as if the parents aren't even there.

One school down, two to go. I get a little bit of a break this week, as it's my office week. Tomorrow (Monday) is another day off, Tuesday I'm team-teaching with my former boss, Wednesday I'm team-teaching with another teacher and Thursday I'll be observing my JT's lessons. Friday is my birthday (yay!), and it's an office day, so maybe I'll buy a small cake at the convenience store and eat it in the classroom by myself.