A Day in the Life of a Peppy Teacher!

Hello from the land of Tropical Storm Henry!  The storm dissipated a few days ago, and never made it to typhoon status, but I was really hoping to experience my first typhoon.  Unfortunately (for me, fortunately for the rest of the people living here) Henry slightly missed Tochigi and was nearly done by the time it got near us.  We just got a couple hours of steady rain.  Oh well. My colleagues have promised me that typhoon season is not over, so I still have a chance! Peppy Kids Club did consider canceling Tochigi Prefecture lessons, but then decided against it, so my day continued on as normal.  Well, as normal as any Peppy teacher’s day can really be.  I sang some funny songs (including the longest version of Old MacDonald Had A Farm ever recorded), danced some silly dances (including pretending to be a number of barn animals for the previously mentioned song) and helped children wrestle with the language I am rapidly determining is the most difficult you can try to learn. 

Now, I most certainly have my fair share of difficulties learning Japanese, but at least Japanese makes a little bit of sense.  There are many rules and you follow all of them, all the time.  Yet, as we all have been taught since elementary school, English is a language made of exceptions. Imagine trying to explain to 8 year olds why JapanESE are people from Japan , but people from the United States of America  are called AmeriCANS, or why English only uses counters for a select few occasions.  One of my favorite, and most infuriating, parts of the Japanese language, is that every kind of object has a different counter.  Round objects are counted one way, money another, and cylindrical objects in yet another.  Chopsticks (ohashi) have their own unique counter, not used by any other word in the language.  Now, the counters we have in English are few and far between. A slice is one.  You don’t ask for 2 bread, you ask for 2 slices of bread.  So, although I can count, I still sound like a 3 year old when referring to any number of objects.  However maddening this might be, I do have a healthy respect for the amount of deliberation and precision that goes into speaking Japanese.  You must think about how you are going to say something, not just about subject at hand.  This also provides for Japanese to be the language of subtlety.  Carefully chosen degrees of politeness and specific descriptive words are used to give context and meaning.  One can speak volumes in a simple sentence.  If only I could decipher the intent.  That, however, seems to be something that even the most experienced listener and speaker of Japanese is still grappling with.  I sometimes wonder if the speaker is always aware of all the repercussions of their chosen words.

With regards to teaching English, especially with the younger students, I find it is better, and most certainly easier, to not emphasize the exceptions, or even the rules, but instead focus on the parts of English that I have the unique position in their lives to really improve.  As a native English speaker, often the only one these children have access to, I can help students with pronunciation, listening, comprehension and speaking more than almost all of my Japanese counterparts.  As I speak little to no Japanese, I can’t actually explain grammar to these students.  I can, however, demonstrate it in real use.  Sometimes this is effective, sometimes the student leaves more confused than they arrive.  That is the dilemma all teachers of a foreign language face. While Peppy Kids Club certainly has its faults, I think the model of Peppy education is a really valuable one.  They introduce children to English at a young age, focusing on comprehension and speaking over grammar and have 3 lessons a month taught by Japanese teachers, who can answer questions and communicate with the students in their own language, and 1 lesson a month taught by a Native speaker, who can improve the students understanding of the language as well as their global awareness.  So how do I actually do these things?  By being a NT or Native Teacher with Peppy Kids Club!

So what exactly do I do? Welcome to a day in the life of Peppy Teacher!

I wake up in the morning, often near the crack of noon, to prepare for my day.  This might include a trip to my new bank, the Japan Post  Office, to withdraw some money, or perhaps running errands such as buying a rice cooker (my plan for tomorrow).  Now, classes start at a different time each day.  I am given a schedule for each month detailing what lessons I am teaching at which schools.  Typically, I have 1 week at Utsunomiya Minami School followed by a week of office days, followed by a week at Utsunomiya Yotou School , followed by a week at Ujiie School.  Let’s say this is my week at Utsunomiya Minami School.  A week of lessons typically starts on Tuesday, as my normal weekend is Sundays and Mondays, and lessons normally start somewhere between 4 and 5pm.  On Tuesday I will have my first lesson starting at 5 pm.  Minami is about 25 min away from my apartment, so I will head to the train station around 2:00 pm.  I walk to the train station, 5 minutes away from my apartment, and then catch a train, typically within the first 10 min of arriving.  I take the train for a brief 5 min and get off at the first stop and begin my 15 min walk to the school.  The Suzumenomiya neighborhood, where this school is located, is a nice, quiet residential neighborhood.  I walk past the local elementary school, sometimes catching a bit of sports practice in the playground.  Next to a fruit store and laundromat is the Peppy Kids Club Classroom.  We call them classrooms and not schools because there is only ever one lesson going on at a time, as well as only one teacher in the school at a time.  This particular school looks like a storefront, though some seem to be designed to originally be restaurants or apartments.  Walking into the school is much like walking into an elementary or preschool in the US.  There are bright ABC’s on the wall and posters showing happy children doing a verb, with the word written out next to them.  Some Japanese teacher’s decorate their room with crafts the children have made or store bought posters.  I swear one of the posters saying “Welcome to School” is one that was in my kindergarten classroom.  I have arrived at the school by 2:30 pm (at least) and can start to prepare.  Now, we are only required to be at the school one hour before the start of lessons.  This is called “number one status” (why, I do not know).  We are on number one status until we have worked here for three months.  After that we are only required to be there 30 minutes prior to lessons and we don’t have to call to check in to confirm we are there.  I call Head Office in Nagoya as soon as I arrive to let them know I am there.  They normally thank me for being early and wish me good luck on my lessons.  Now I have 2.5 hours to prep for classes.  Most teachers learn how to prep lessons quicker the longer they work here and only show up one hour before.  I am still new to this, so I like to give myself ample time.  I get the materials I might need and put everything in order for the lessons. On Tuesdays at Minami I teach 2 Aqua Lessons and a PEP Talk lesson. All lessons at Peppy are an hour long with at least 15 minutes in between lessons.  I have anywhere from 1-5 lessons a day, but normally 2 or 3. At around 5 minutes to 5:00 pm my Aqua students arrive.  Peppy lessons are divided into 3 categories: Packet, Headway and Junior.  Packet Classes are the youngest and the levels are labeled by color.  Headway is the majority of the lessons I teach and are the Elementary to Middle School students. They are also divided into levels labeled by color.  Junior classes are middle school and a few young high school students and are given names to separate the level (PEP Talk, Pre-Step Up, Step Up, Junior English Pathways and Interchange).  So, my Aqua class is a Headway category class which is right in the middle of age groups and difficulty level.  The students are 10-11 years old.  There is a limit to 12 students per class, though I normally teach groups of 5-8.  As they come in I greet their parents and welcome the students into the classroom.  As students filter in, I am individually checking each student’s “Picture Cards” they have prepared.  They learn 2-10 flash cards each week and I stamp their book after they show me they know the cards.  I also check their homework from their Japanese teacher and give them their name tag.  Then I usually give them a worksheet or some other assignment (practice writing the ABC’s) for their “Welcome Activity.”  After everybody has done a picture card/homework check, it is normally 10 minutes into the lesson, so I lock the door.  I then help the students finish up the Welcome Activity and move onto attendance.  I normally try to get the students to do silly voices or action for attendance (this month I made them all say “I’m here!” like a gorilla. Hilarious!).  I then move into the Greeting Questions, when I play a game  and ask some questions I know the students already know.  For an Aqua class, I would probably do a Ball Toss game, and if you drop the ball, I ask you question such as “How’s the weather?” or “How old are you?”  Then we would move into the main part of the lesson.  I have the students do the chant or song and dance for the term we are in and sometimes play a game. I review the previous lesson’s material and then teach a new expression.  The new expression for the Aqua class last month was “How tall are you?” “I’m BLANK centimeters tall.”  I then play a game with the expression and try to have the students say it A LOT.  I then review an expression from quite a few lessons ago.  Sometimes this means re-teaching it, but if we have time, I will do another game.  I then do a section called Global Studies, where we learn about differences and similarities between cultures.  Last month Aqua learned about inches, which are only used in the US, Myanmar and Liberia. That was a really difficult one to explain without speaking Japanese.  Then I do a game with the phonics for that term.  Last month was silent e, and we did a race to group them into o-e, i-e, etc.  With five minutes to go, we quickly review the entire lesson and I assign homework (normally listening to a particular track on their CD at home).  They return their name tags, grab their bags, line up at the door and ask me if they may go home.  I normally have them answer one question in English before letting them leave, so their parents can see what we worked on that day.  I thank their parents in Japanese and wave goodbye until I can no longer see their cars.  Then it all starts over with the next lesson in about 10 min.  Repeat three times and my day is nearly complete.  I write a few lesson reports to let the JT (Japanese Teacher) know what happened during the lessons and write about any problems in the Communication Notebook, a written dialogue between JTs and NTs.  I clean up the classroom and catch my train home by 9:00 pm and am back in my apartment by 9:30pm.  David and I normally make dinner then, or on a particularly long or hard day go out to grab a bite to eat.  This happens five days of the week, 3 weeks of the month.  On my office days, I either cover for another teacher or prepare game materials in a nearby classroom.  However, mostly I am left to my own devices which suites me just fine. 

Now that was a fairly exhaustive account of David’s and my daily life, but I would be happy to answer any questions anybody has, as I have had quite a few people requesting this particular blog post.  David and I have LOVED our jobs so far.  The kids are great and teaching is really fun.  We really get paid to play with kids in English for an hour at time, which in my book, is pretty darn cool.  Till next time, sayonara!