Tokyo Fox (東京狐)

Switched my mobile phone on last Sunday afternoon to find a message from the standby co-ordinator of my company saying I was on standby and needed to do sickness cover that morning! This was a big shock to me as had no idea I was down for it despite scanning the schedules many times.

I was already five hours late when I listened to the message and so in a panic I just phoned a random company number and spoke to someone in another district who confirmed my name was indeed on the schedule but not in the predominant West Tokyo district column which I run my eye over when it appears at the end of each month in anticipation of the following month.

Obviously it was my fault and my fault only for not checking the schedule thoroughly but I honestly had no idea and to add insult to injury I stayed in on the Saturday night, had no plans for Sunday and only turned off my phone before I went to bed as my spam mail has been increasing throughout the night recently and one doesn’t want to be woken up by such a thing. To cap it all off it was blo*dy raining on Sunday and in my mind an ideal day to do an extra days work which was just the icing on a filthy tasting cake!

A fax or two has been sent round our schools recently regarding people basically taking the p*ss on the subject of the sickness cover system emplyed by the company and with it the threat of a days pay being docked which would have been a bitter pill for me to swallow as I have never called in sick and always been reliable in such situations.

Since I first penned this article it has been decided that I will indeed be singled out and made to pay the price for my first offence for which I will definitely appeal. The case continues.

I’ve mentioned before that it’s part and parcel of life as a teacher that students will come and go but lately it seems to have been a bad time with a fair few students going or soon to be leaving. The end of March is the climax of the school year and inevitably with this there are some changes, particularly where the kids are concerned due to their age, lesson time and other school commitments.

In the last year I have tried to breathe fresh life into most of my lessons because if you don’t teaching can become a bit tedious and so consequently I have increased my efforts in making my lessons (even!) more entertaining by trying to come up with new and different things. This includes using music, photos, worksheets, real menus and information pamphlets, special lessons and so on which keeps me interested, motivated and (hopefully) more sane than if I was to just do the bare minimum and wing each lesson.

I hope I don’t sound too arrogant when I say that these students are not leaving because of me or my lessons being bad or whatever but I do take it personally. Also, its a numbers game and even though most of the students excuses or reasons for leaving/transferring are valid I realise only too well that it many not look that way to anyone looking in from the outside. Of course in due time the departing students will be substituted for new ones but at the moment I just feel unfortunate that a fair number of people all seem to be going in close proximity to one another.

Last month was observation time for me again and on this occasion my boss decided to come and watch what I consider to be my best kids class. Not only was he present in the classroom but so too was his boss who was observing him! Turns out he wasn’t just watching him watching me but watching my lesson and then comparing notes to see if their thinking was likewise.

Intimidating for most but the show-off in me was nervously excited about showing them what I could do. Thankfully the kids weren’t phased by having all these grown men in the classroom which was a relief as they can often withdraw into their shells in a major way. On the contrary as they were actually more playful than usual and maybe playing up to the crowd.

The lesson started with the entrance drill to the sound of the theme from ‘Rocky‘ which went off very well and then it was into a fairly sizable chunk of review games which I tend to do most weeks before hitting them with the new target language. This time it was the use of “Do you have a/an…..” which of course sounds like a piece of p*ss to anyone reading this but for their age (9-10) its not that simple and even more difficult is changing “do you” to “does he/she” when talking about someone else.

Also on the agenda were the phonic sounds ‘ee’, ‘oa’, ‘ai’, ‘or’ which need to be known to help their reading. It wasn’t just the language that was being observed but also my pacing, timing, preparation, student rapport, classroom management, discipline, control, drilling and so on.

Quite a lot to look at in just 55 minutes I’m sure you’ll agree and luckily I came out of it fairly well following my feedback session the other week. In fact I received a lot of praise which was just reward for my efforts with this particular class over the last two years. Of course there were also some areas which I need to work on to make me a better teacher and I will bare them in mind over the next few weeks as I continue in this job.