Tokyo Fox (東京狐)

The Japanese working day is ridiculously long compared to that in the west. The traditional nine to five working day is fairly unheard of and instead there is a ten till nine  day or something like that. Thats not to say that they do any more work than us but they have a culture whereby they feel the need to stay in the office until their boss has called it a day. This is also for fear of upsetting their colleagues and thus uspetting the social harmony of the office but i don’t agree with that in the workplace. It’s far more fun and usual to gloat to co-workers about your impending holidays or days off or whatever.

Luckily I work for a British company so don’t have to follow such stupid rules but yesterday I did get a taster of what such a long working day is like. I had to teach another Spring school kids lesson special between 10am and noon which was a small and very likeable group which I enjoyed very much and passed by fairly quickly. After that I had my regular schedule from 1 pm which also included lots of new kids classes as April brought about a new school year. Having arrived in the school at 9:30 am it was 9 pm by the time I left for a few cheeky pints.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a sad farewell and this last week has had a few similar moments. My school year is the same as the financial year meaning that a new year starts on April Fools Day. Its all change at my schools therefore and so this week I have had to say ‘See you bai bai’ (the Japanese interpretation of our goodbye) to a number of my kids.

The saddest of these was on Thursday when I had my last lesson with two of my favourite students. The two girls are both five years old and great fun to teach and well behaved  but with enough cheek to make it a bit more exciting for me to teach them. I find there’s no challenge in teaching kids who do everything you ask of them.

   

The harsh reality of these farewells is that the kids don’t really care (it was the same for me when I was younger and teachers came and went) and that within a few minutes of their next lessons with the new teacher I will no doubt be long forgotten. I will have to see what my new schedule is like for the next term to see if they will become history or fondly remembered. In some ways I hope the latter but I don’t really want to become depressed about it if my new class doesn’t make me happy. 

I recently found out that I had to do four Spring schools on top of my regular schedule. These are basically a special two hour class for kids which the parents may or may not use as an excuse to get them out of their hair for a couple of hours.

Apart from the extra hours one of the hardest things about these schools is getting up at a normal time. I had to get up at 8:30 am this morning which is quite late when I’m in the UK but to get up before 10 or 11 am here is just madness and rarely done. Obviously I do work late every night and don’t like to do too much before work as I’ll then be tired in class and yawning in class is a big faux pas.

Luckily my Spring school schedule was reduced from four to one as there wasn’t enough demand in some of my schools. However, I did teach the biggest class today consisting of eight Kindergarten students. They were all cute kids but two hours is maybe too long for them to concentrate and focus, especially after the half-time break of some cheap unhealthy sugary treats.

Despite the fairly lame lesson plan (probably written by someone who hasn’t taught for a long time and has no idea about the reality of a lesson being different from what it says in the textbooks) it was good fun but I was quite exhausted by the end of the day. Thankfully, thats my quota of extra work done until the Summer schools take place.