Second eight-hour day of work - September 23, 2007

Yesterday went so smoothly for me. I feel good about the job, and the people that I work with, which is important. Today I was supposed to meet another coworker, Ari, but he called in sick. At a small branch like the one that I work at called Mizuhodai (named after the train staition), there are usually only two instructors working at a time. In fact, before I started, there were only two regular instructors there, and they would bring in one person from another branch; now that I am the third regular instructor, they don’t need to bring in other people.

So as it happened, because Mizuhodai is only one train stop from mine (Tsuruse), I thought that I could leave a little later than usual. I didn’t realize that the trains run less frequently on Sunday, so, although I wasn’t late, I got to work with only five minutes to plan my lessons. I was nervous, but handled it ok. Then the staff lady, Yuka, told me that Ari was calling in sick, and that she would cancel his lessons. Fine with me. About a minute before the classes started, I saw the students waiting in the classroom (its actually more like a cubicle), and they were not the students that I had prepared for. I asked Yuka about that, and she said that she had cancelled my lessons, and that I would take Ari’s. I had to completely scrap what I had planned, and come up with a new lesson because they were higher leveled students than the ones I prepared for. Of course, I pulled it off without a hitch, and the rest of the day went smoothly, while I was in the office all day by myself (with Yuka). The mix up happened because she spoke less-than-perfect English, and I spoke less than less-than-perfect Japanese.

Apparently being in a small office like mine is much better than being in a big office, like Paola. There are many instructors (probably about 6 at one time) at her office, but they have about as much space as I do at my office (where I was alone today, but has two people at the most at one time). What this means is that people are trying to get as much space as they can to sit down and prepare before a lesson, and grade the students after a lesson. Furthermore, they have to wait to get access to the file drawers to get the info for their next class (which they need to plan), which is further complicated when people have the files that you need because they just taught the student you are about to teach. Frustrations abound, and that is really the main thing that Paola has complained to me about. On the bright side, she isn’t at all complaining about her ability to do the job, and she is as confident as can be about it now.