Well, it's Wednesday morning here and I'm back from my trip to the Noto Peninsula. It was nice to visit rural Japan again and see old friends. The trip did me good in that it helped me to remember that Kobe isn't all there is to Japan, thank god. Monday was tough, though.
Despite catching an earlier than usual subway, we were still packed in like sardines--and because it wasn't particularly hot, the air con was on very low, if at all. I can't imagine spending 20 or 30 years of my life traveling to and from work this way. At any rate, school was okay, but I feel under utilized in most class settings. It's not uncommon for 90% of a class to be taught in Japanese or for half of the students in class to be sleeping. In the after-lunch class on Monday, it was actually more like 3/4 of the students with their heads down. Having lived in Japan before and taught at an agricultural high school, I wasn't under the naive impression that all Japanese students diligently study in a well disciplined, highly rigorous setting, but I wasn't quite prepared for this either. It's still early for me, though, and perhaps things will improve in the classroom, or perhaps I'll play a more integral role, but like I said in an earlier post--I'm the assistant, and they've never had one of us stay for more than a year, so it's hard to create buy in. But I'll keep trying.
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