A Typical Week at Work

Each week Stephanie and I are scheduled for a total of 34 lessons over a 5 day period. To complete this schedule, each week we work 3 full days (8 lessons each) and 2 partial days (5 lessons each). These lessons vary depending on who our students are each time.

The students all fall into the following groups:

1) Diplomat (adults; ages 13 and up), and
2) Kids (which are broken down into 4 further categories)
a. Seniors – Ages 10 - 12
b. Juniors – Ages 7 - 9
c. Kinder – Ages 4 - 6
d. Chibiko – Ages 2 & 3

So far I (Nick) have only been teaching the adults in ‘Diplomat’. However, Stephanie just went through training for ‘Chibiko’ on Saturday, and we both went through the training for ‘Kinder’, ‘Juniors’ and ‘Seniors’ last Tuesday. Soon, when we begin teaching kids classes, we will have a lot more variety in the lessons we teach each week. As Steph mentioned in a previous post, we also have a language lab called ‘Voice’ for adult students.

Our hours at the branch vary by day. In fact, some days we work at each of two different branches. In Sasebo there is one main branch located downtown (pictured above) where we spend most of our days. However, once a week we each help out at a satellite branch on the outskirts of town. So, in posts we will refer to our main branch as Sasebo (pronounced ‘sah-sey-bo’ with even emphasis on each syllable) and refer to our satellite branch as Daito (pronounced ‘die-toe’). Daito is not as busy as Sasebo, which is why we only teach there once a week. It’s a quick commute; a 5 minute walk to the train station and a 9 minute train ride.

In regards to class size, Diplomat classes each have 1 teacher and anywhere from 1 to 4 students. This creates even more variety for our classes, because sometimes we’re teaching one-on-one, and other times we have the opportunity to pair students up for learning activities. The different levels of children’s classes can also have any number of students, but most often there are between 3 and 8 students. The kids classes are taught in a much more informal environment, especially in Chibiko. Steph could tell you more since she’s already been trained for Chibiko, but I do know that, with these 2 & 3 year old students, a parent sits in with each student. I won’t say too much more about any of the kids classes until we have more experience teaching them.

Please feel free to ask any other questions you may have about our work, or you can click on the ‘Teach in Japan’ link to the right.