JET Orientation

I'm so behind with blog posts it actually hurts... But next on my list is Jet Orientation! Way back on the... 9th ... of July. The day of the wonderful tube strike!

As they said at Orientation, this really was the first day of the job, I broke out my BRAND NEW SUIT (ugh), ate some awful breakfast from the awful on campus cafe (seriously what is that university, it's horrible) stayed in an awful room in a flat full of boys (SERIOUSLY?) and attended a lot of workshops and lectures.

The lectures were really helpful, despite almost every single lecturer, including the Japanese Embassy being late. Well, they were mostly helpful but I feel like we could've been given more info on daily life. The teaching workshop was a little pointless, we discussed drilling techniques and they're all techniques I use at Kumon. I get the feeling the majority of UK JET's have zero teach experience if they don't know basic drilling. We also had a really inspiring lecture from Michael Maher King, he actually did a TED talk. His lecturing skills are much better now but you can get the gist of what he said here!

I made some friends on the first day and went out for food with them (god forbid going back to the on campus cafe!) and the next day was dedicated to Japanese classes ... all day! IJ1 at SOAS made me feel awful about my language ability so I put myself in the intermediate class (even though technically I guess I should've been in advanced) but it turned out that intermediate was full of people too nervous to go into advanced so it worked out well! We covered a lot of stuff I already knew but it raised my confidence and it was nice to feel I was good at Japanese again. I have a nice shiny new self intro to use in Japan now too! But... again, I feel like most JET's don't know Japanese, there were only 2 classes for people who knew some Japanese, the rest were complete beginner classes as far as I could tell. It does make me wonder what kind of person they actually wanted to participate in the programme.

But anyway! I'm glad that's over, next week is Tokyo orientation (ugh more classes?) but we'll be in groups with people going to our prefecture so I'm looking forward to meeting people I'll actually be close to!