Now that I've scared everyone off, I think of something useful to write.
If anyone has any ideas for souvenirs they might want when I get back to the states, let me know. Food is OK (obviously only dry food or non-refridgerated stuff). I already have some ideas, and actually have bought something for one person, but I figured I'd throw this out there in case someone's dying for a specific item.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Meh
So I've pretty much given up on blog posting. For some reason, writing these posts just destroys every ounce of energy that I have. Every time I sit down to write something, I just become completely exhausted within minutes. Plus there's not really anything to write about since all I do is go to work and eat and sleep. I have a bunch of pictures that I want to work on, and hopefully I can get those knocked out before I leave the country (I'm getting some deja vu all of the sudden, hmm...)
I figure the only people reading this are people I'd be telling any interesting stories to either in person or on the phone when I get back to America, so if you really want to know anything, just hold on a couple more months.
I figure the only people reading this are people I'd be telling any interesting stories to either in person or on the phone when I get back to America, so if you really want to know anything, just hold on a couple more months.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
Pictures? Are you kidding me and my balls? ☞
As amazing as it might sound, I actually updated an entire new album of pictures on my site (link on the right side, remember?). Yes, it only took over two months to finalize about 40 pictures; what can I say, I'm a speed demon. Oh yeah, and ignore the OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA captions for now, I'll go back and add some real ones soon.
I have a pretty good handle on my picture processing...uh, process, now, so I should be able to pump them out at a decent speed from now on. I figure at this pace by the end of January I should have the other six or seven sets up.
I also bought a tripod, at a pretty awesome deal from what I can tell (under $30 after applying my frequent shopper points), which means I can take some decent night shots for once. I'm going to use it to try out some HDR pictures now, some examples of which can be found here.
I have a pretty good handle on my picture processing...uh, process, now, so I should be able to pump them out at a decent speed from now on. I figure at this pace by the end of January I should have the other six or seven sets up.
I also bought a tripod, at a pretty awesome deal from what I can tell (under $30 after applying my frequent shopper points), which means I can take some decent night shots for once. I'm going to use it to try out some HDR pictures now, some examples of which can be found here.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Busy Holidays
This has been one of the busier weeks that I've had in this country so far. Here's the rundown:
Last Saturday
Normally most of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo is off-limits to the public except for certain parts on tours, but on the Emperor's birthday (Dec. 23rd) they open up everything except the actual insides of the buildings for random people to come in and bask in the palace's glory. After a pretty long walk over some moats and through several enormous gates, we got to a big crowd hanging out in front of the main inner building. After a while the Emperor and the Royal Family came out on the balcony to stand there and look important while everyone cheered and waved paper flags. Then the Emperor gave a really short speech and they went back inside. I managed to get a few decent pictures through the maze of flags, and a couple outside the palace. Unfortunately they weren't too keen on people hanging around taking pictures, so I didn't get much chance to hang around and take many more.
Later on we met with one of Noli's friends' friends, a guy who I immediately noticed looked like Elton John. I couldn't tell whether or not he was amused by me telling him this. But he did end up buying us tickets to his friend's concert, not to mention a neverending stream of food there, including such budget items as $5 Saltines.
Thursday
We tried to play some table tennis at the prefectural table tennis center, but they were closed. After several hours of searching, we finally found a replacement, which actually turned out to be way better in terms of price and space. In fact, for whatever reason, we were given an entire half of a pretty enormous gym, basically an entire basketball court to ourselves. Noli also talked to someone who gave us the heads up on a TT club there, which might be something to check out later on.
Friday
In one of the more interesting and anticipated trips that I've had, we went to Comiket in Tokyo, which is the biggest comic convention in the world. According to Wikipedia, there are around 35,000 dealer groups and over 430,000 attendees over three days. Perhaps the best part: it's free with no reservations required. Unfortunately, since I can't really read Japanese and I haven't kept up with much anime stuff lately, the vast majority of the material there didn't interest me, so I didn't end up buying anything. But we did get to check out one thing that I've always wanted to see: a cosplay exhibition.
What is cosplay, you might ask? Basically it's one of the nerdier hobbies that I've seen, where people dress up as video game and anime characters and walk around to let people take pictures of them, often in the characters' trademark poses. Sometimes you get some people with fairly pathetic costumes that make you cringe, but since this was easily the highest-level anime convention that exists, all the chumps were too ashamed to make an appearance. There were definitely some people there that had to have spent several weeks putting these things together, and a few I wouldn't doubt that they started the initial costume planning back in October or so.
We got to the cosplay area with only about an hour left before closing time, so we had to go into picture-taking overdrive to cover all the ones worth looking at. We formed a tag-team with Noli at the camera and me scanning the crowd for new models. Unfortunately this was all out on a roof about an hour and a half before sunset, so there were some fairly horrible shadows going on for most of the shots, but we did manage to get some decent ones.
Saturday
After heading up to Noli's neck of the woods Friday night, we drove out to the house of one of his teacher coworkers to take part in mochitsuki, or rice pounding. There's a winter holiday tradition in Japan of making this sticky rice dough called mochi a few days before the start of the new year. Mochi is made basically by slamming hot rice over and over with a giant mallet until it turns into a dough, then rolling it out into a sheet and pulling off chunks to make into various dishes and desserts. Noli took quite a few turns with the mallet, but I politely declined because I didn't want to break their equipment with my rippling muscles. In addition to eating quite a bit of mochi-based food, we also got a free lunch of various snacks once it was all over.
That evening we went to a guy who works with the local Board of Education for another free meal followed by shuji, or Japanese brush writing practice. Not surprisingly, considering I have a hard time writing English characters much less foreign ones, my efforts turned out pretty subpar, but it was interesting nonetheless. I realized afterward that shodou, Japanese calligraphy, is one of the only aspects of Japanese language that I'm still interested in, so I might still pursue that even in America.
-----------------
I'm going to be spending essentially all day editing and hopefully posting photos to my photo website, which should now be listed on the right side of this page ("Kyle's Photo Albums"). Actually, I found a feature with my photo service that gives you a notice when I add photos. If you get an account with Picasa (it's free), then you can send me your Picasa user name and I'll add you to my favorite users list. Then you get a little notice on your Picasa webpage every time I update my albums. Otherwise you could just check my blog, because I'll also mention here whenever I update pictures.
Last Saturday
Normally most of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo is off-limits to the public except for certain parts on tours, but on the Emperor's birthday (Dec. 23rd) they open up everything except the actual insides of the buildings for random people to come in and bask in the palace's glory. After a pretty long walk over some moats and through several enormous gates, we got to a big crowd hanging out in front of the main inner building. After a while the Emperor and the Royal Family came out on the balcony to stand there and look important while everyone cheered and waved paper flags. Then the Emperor gave a really short speech and they went back inside. I managed to get a few decent pictures through the maze of flags, and a couple outside the palace. Unfortunately they weren't too keen on people hanging around taking pictures, so I didn't get much chance to hang around and take many more.
Later on we met with one of Noli's friends' friends, a guy who I immediately noticed looked like Elton John. I couldn't tell whether or not he was amused by me telling him this. But he did end up buying us tickets to his friend's concert, not to mention a neverending stream of food there, including such budget items as $5 Saltines.
Thursday
We tried to play some table tennis at the prefectural table tennis center, but they were closed. After several hours of searching, we finally found a replacement, which actually turned out to be way better in terms of price and space. In fact, for whatever reason, we were given an entire half of a pretty enormous gym, basically an entire basketball court to ourselves. Noli also talked to someone who gave us the heads up on a TT club there, which might be something to check out later on.
Friday
In one of the more interesting and anticipated trips that I've had, we went to Comiket in Tokyo, which is the biggest comic convention in the world. According to Wikipedia, there are around 35,000 dealer groups and over 430,000 attendees over three days. Perhaps the best part: it's free with no reservations required. Unfortunately, since I can't really read Japanese and I haven't kept up with much anime stuff lately, the vast majority of the material there didn't interest me, so I didn't end up buying anything. But we did get to check out one thing that I've always wanted to see: a cosplay exhibition.
What is cosplay, you might ask? Basically it's one of the nerdier hobbies that I've seen, where people dress up as video game and anime characters and walk around to let people take pictures of them, often in the characters' trademark poses. Sometimes you get some people with fairly pathetic costumes that make you cringe, but since this was easily the highest-level anime convention that exists, all the chumps were too ashamed to make an appearance. There were definitely some people there that had to have spent several weeks putting these things together, and a few I wouldn't doubt that they started the initial costume planning back in October or so.
We got to the cosplay area with only about an hour left before closing time, so we had to go into picture-taking overdrive to cover all the ones worth looking at. We formed a tag-team with Noli at the camera and me scanning the crowd for new models. Unfortunately this was all out on a roof about an hour and a half before sunset, so there were some fairly horrible shadows going on for most of the shots, but we did manage to get some decent ones.
Saturday
After heading up to Noli's neck of the woods Friday night, we drove out to the house of one of his teacher coworkers to take part in mochitsuki, or rice pounding. There's a winter holiday tradition in Japan of making this sticky rice dough called mochi a few days before the start of the new year. Mochi is made basically by slamming hot rice over and over with a giant mallet until it turns into a dough, then rolling it out into a sheet and pulling off chunks to make into various dishes and desserts. Noli took quite a few turns with the mallet, but I politely declined because I didn't want to break their equipment with my rippling muscles. In addition to eating quite a bit of mochi-based food, we also got a free lunch of various snacks once it was all over.
That evening we went to a guy who works with the local Board of Education for another free meal followed by shuji, or Japanese brush writing practice. Not surprisingly, considering I have a hard time writing English characters much less foreign ones, my efforts turned out pretty subpar, but it was interesting nonetheless. I realized afterward that shodou, Japanese calligraphy, is one of the only aspects of Japanese language that I'm still interested in, so I might still pursue that even in America.
-----------------
I'm going to be spending essentially all day editing and hopefully posting photos to my photo website, which should now be listed on the right side of this page ("Kyle's Photo Albums"). Actually, I found a feature with my photo service that gives you a notice when I add photos. If you get an account with Picasa (it's free), then you can send me your Picasa user name and I'll add you to my favorite users list. Then you get a little notice on your Picasa webpage every time I update my albums. Otherwise you could just check my blog, because I'll also mention here whenever I update pictures.
Monday, December 18, 2006
Further further plans
Sorry that I once again went a huge span of time without posting anything. In my defense, there haven't been a whole lot of noteworthy events happening since my last post. Well, except one I guess.
I've pretty much decided that I'm not staying here past my contract. I know in my last few posts it seemed like the possibility of staying was pretty strong, but that was when I was only considering the job satisfaction and my financial position. I hadn't given any thought to how much I would enjoy the stuff outside work, which is signficantly more time. I can't really give a concise answer that really does a good job of explaining why I feel like I'd be better off in America, and when I tried writing a drawn-out explanation, it kind of wandered and the reasons sounded pitiful. So the best thing I've come up with is that it's a million small reasons and one major one. The million small things are just too minor to mention individually, but they kind of all add up to one big irritation.
Of course, the major thing is not being able to speak or read Japanese enough to really communicate beyond really basic stuff. I started writing yet another long exposition on this, but just another summary: the last few months of Japanese study were pretty mind-numbing, and thinking about going back into it, which I would almost certainly need to if I wanted to stay a whole extra year, is not appealing to me at all.
Actually another reason is that staying here is just delaying my career for another year. Sure, I'd have a lot of money in my pocket when I hit America in 2008, but if you consider the fact that I'd essentially be subtracting a year of work in my American job--which is certainly going to pay more than this one--in the long term I'd be losing money the longer I stay.
So anyway, I'm definitely enjoying my stay here, and I most certainly have not regretted coming here, but I am quite sure at this point that I'll be heading out after my contract's over, probably after a week or two of final sightseeing.
---
I also went to the John Lennon Museum in the city next to this one. It was pretty nice, and had quite a few items from his personal things, like several guitars that he owned and quite a few drawings that he made with Yoko Ono. The more interesting items were (might want to skip all this if you don't care about the Beatles, because none of it will make any sense or be interesting at all): some of his elementary school diaries and school projects; some costumes worn for the Sgt. Pepper cover photo; the circus poster that inspired the song "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite"; the sleeveless "New York City" shirt that he wore in a pretty famous photograph; the piano that he composed "Imagine" on (and played in the music video); a door from the mansion that said music video was filmed in (huh?); and a ton of handwritten drafts of lyrics--I can't remember all the songs, but there had to be at least 20, and all of them were hits or at least recognizable.
Of course, I would be able to show you high-resolution pictures of all these and more, but some ridiculous reason they didn't allow cameras anywhere past the lobby! I've never heard of a museum that didn't allow photography. I probably could have gotten away with the "Dumb Foreigner" act if I wanted to, but they did hand me a thing written in perfect English saying that photography was not allowed, so...But yeah, that pissed me off a lot. Other than that, it was really nice.
Kind of funny note: there was a dedicated Yoko Ono section about 70% of the way through. I saw maybe two or three people in the museum the whole time before reaching that point, where I saw easily 12 intensely studying all of her items. Guess they wished the museum would get rid of all that boring John Lennon crap and just replace it with her art, huh? Actually one of her art pieces was pretty awesome. It was an old-style rotary telephone in a little open recessed cabinet thing, and you could pick up the handle and everything. The sign underneath said that she had it installed on a phone line separate from the rest of the building, and that she occasionally calls that phone and talks with whatever visitor happens to pick it up. I was hoping a little that it would ring while I was standing there so that I could brag to everyone about how I talked to Yoko Ono on the phone, to which they would reply, "...So?"
----
And finally, I have probably twice as many pics to process and post as are actually up on my picture website. This Friday is my last day of work until January 9th, so I'll be going through all those (along with whatever ones I take during winter sightseeing) during the holidays.
I've pretty much decided that I'm not staying here past my contract. I know in my last few posts it seemed like the possibility of staying was pretty strong, but that was when I was only considering the job satisfaction and my financial position. I hadn't given any thought to how much I would enjoy the stuff outside work, which is signficantly more time. I can't really give a concise answer that really does a good job of explaining why I feel like I'd be better off in America, and when I tried writing a drawn-out explanation, it kind of wandered and the reasons sounded pitiful. So the best thing I've come up with is that it's a million small reasons and one major one. The million small things are just too minor to mention individually, but they kind of all add up to one big irritation.
Of course, the major thing is not being able to speak or read Japanese enough to really communicate beyond really basic stuff. I started writing yet another long exposition on this, but just another summary: the last few months of Japanese study were pretty mind-numbing, and thinking about going back into it, which I would almost certainly need to if I wanted to stay a whole extra year, is not appealing to me at all.
Actually another reason is that staying here is just delaying my career for another year. Sure, I'd have a lot of money in my pocket when I hit America in 2008, but if you consider the fact that I'd essentially be subtracting a year of work in my American job--which is certainly going to pay more than this one--in the long term I'd be losing money the longer I stay.
So anyway, I'm definitely enjoying my stay here, and I most certainly have not regretted coming here, but I am quite sure at this point that I'll be heading out after my contract's over, probably after a week or two of final sightseeing.
---
I also went to the John Lennon Museum in the city next to this one. It was pretty nice, and had quite a few items from his personal things, like several guitars that he owned and quite a few drawings that he made with Yoko Ono. The more interesting items were (might want to skip all this if you don't care about the Beatles, because none of it will make any sense or be interesting at all): some of his elementary school diaries and school projects; some costumes worn for the Sgt. Pepper cover photo; the circus poster that inspired the song "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite"; the sleeveless "New York City" shirt that he wore in a pretty famous photograph; the piano that he composed "Imagine" on (and played in the music video); a door from the mansion that said music video was filmed in (huh?); and a ton of handwritten drafts of lyrics--I can't remember all the songs, but there had to be at least 20, and all of them were hits or at least recognizable.
Of course, I would be able to show you high-resolution pictures of all these and more, but some ridiculous reason they didn't allow cameras anywhere past the lobby! I've never heard of a museum that didn't allow photography. I probably could have gotten away with the "Dumb Foreigner" act if I wanted to, but they did hand me a thing written in perfect English saying that photography was not allowed, so...But yeah, that pissed me off a lot. Other than that, it was really nice.
Kind of funny note: there was a dedicated Yoko Ono section about 70% of the way through. I saw maybe two or three people in the museum the whole time before reaching that point, where I saw easily 12 intensely studying all of her items. Guess they wished the museum would get rid of all that boring John Lennon crap and just replace it with her art, huh? Actually one of her art pieces was pretty awesome. It was an old-style rotary telephone in a little open recessed cabinet thing, and you could pick up the handle and everything. The sign underneath said that she had it installed on a phone line separate from the rest of the building, and that she occasionally calls that phone and talks with whatever visitor happens to pick it up. I was hoping a little that it would ring while I was standing there so that I could brag to everyone about how I talked to Yoko Ono on the phone, to which they would reply, "...So?"
----
And finally, I have probably twice as many pics to process and post as are actually up on my picture website. This Friday is my last day of work until January 9th, so I'll be going through all those (along with whatever ones I take during winter sightseeing) during the holidays.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Further plans
I talked to one of the more experienced ALTs today about how the rehiring and placement process works for ALTs in Koshigaya, so now I'm a bit more informed on what my chances of hanging here another year are. I'll give a brief (yeah right) description of the whole thing incorporating what I learned today.
Each city has a Board of Education, which is responsible for the ALTs. The ALTs come from a few places: JET (government employees; used to be really huge I think but slowly dying because their salary is too high for BoE's to stomach), private companies (like mine), and exchange things that are similar to JET. I'm not really sure what happens with JET, but with private companies, they accept bids from various companies--"we can supply X ALTs for Y yen"--and basically take the lowest one, or lowest ones if they need more ALTs than one company can deliver at the moment.
Once a given company is told that their bid is good, they send any new ALTs along with a rep from the company to the Board of Education to let the higher-ups eyeball them, though I can't really see what they could determine just from looking at someone and talking to them through an interpreter. Anyway, technically they could refuse any ALTs, or the entire contract, based on this meeting, though from what I hear that rarely happens. If they like what they see, they officially sign the contract for the rest of the school year. This is what we did this semester, because this was Heart School's first contract in Koshigaya.
For people that have already been teaching in the city, they don't have to go through the interview process, but they're not guaranteed a job after a given school year. The BoE determines right after the final semester of a year whether they'll renew their old contracts or go for some combination of new companies and JETs. Their criteria for renewal are their opinion of the ALTs of a company and the price of their contract, in which order I don't know. If they got too many complaints about the ALTs of a company, they'll probably drop the contract unless it's ridiculously cheap.
So back to me: I said earlier that I was thinking of staying, but only if I could stay in the same schools that I have now, or at least roughly so (the elementaries might change a little since there's tons of those, but keeping the same middle school for sure). Up until today I wasn't really sure if there would be any way to request to stay at a school and know the result far enough in advance to not commit to staying there another year. I wouldn't want to make a decision to stay, put off any kind of America plans, then find out that I've been assigned to some totally different school system, possibly in a different city even. But since I also found out today that the break between school years is about 2 weeks (yes, I didn't mistype that), I decided that there's really no way for me to get stuck here in a school that I don't want. Here's how.
Right now, I'm in a "guest house", which is normally used for short-term living. It's cheap and you can walk out at any time without any real repercussions like you would get from breaking an apartment lease, which in Japan is about a thousand times worse than America. Since the period between my contract ending and the next school year starting is a matter of weeks, I can just renew my guest house lease another month and hang around to see whether
(a)my company gets their contract renewed, and
(b)I stay in the same city (99% chance), and
(c)the BoE puts me in my preferred schools.
If it turns out that I get different schools, which I should know within the first week of school, I can see "Sayounara" (probably the first time in history that a white person would be saying that in the correct context when leaving a company) and leave with no financial repercussions. I can then take a couple of weeks to do some sightseeing before heading back to America. I will tell both my company and the BoE that this is what I plan to do. Normally I wouldn't think placing ultimatums would be too great of an idea for someone with my tenuous job security to do, but since I'm perfectly happy leaving if I don't get the situation I want, I really don't care if it causes them to drop me. If they know in advance that I'll leave if I don't get my preference, then it's their own fault if they're stuck without an ALT when I walk out on them.
If, however, I DO get my schools again, I can leave the guest house after the month is up and get an apartment in this area and everything's dandy. I might even get a nicer bike!
So what this means is that I need to be totally sure that I'll stay if I do in fact get my schools again, since I think it would be pretty terrible to have them accept my terms only for me to walk out anyway. I figure I should decide by the beginning of the spring semester (actually trimester) whether or not this will be my course of action. I should definitely meet with one of the BoE people early in the semester to make sure they know well enough in advance that they can take my situation into account before making any final contract or placement decisions. I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on how that goes.
---------
Man that's a lot of words, and I didn't even get to a bunch of the stuff I wanted to. Well, stay tuned for the next few entries where I get advice from a guy teaching elementary school in America, and where a fight breaks out in my hallway and the cops come to sort it out.
Each city has a Board of Education, which is responsible for the ALTs. The ALTs come from a few places: JET (government employees; used to be really huge I think but slowly dying because their salary is too high for BoE's to stomach), private companies (like mine), and exchange things that are similar to JET. I'm not really sure what happens with JET, but with private companies, they accept bids from various companies--"we can supply X ALTs for Y yen"--and basically take the lowest one, or lowest ones if they need more ALTs than one company can deliver at the moment.
Once a given company is told that their bid is good, they send any new ALTs along with a rep from the company to the Board of Education to let the higher-ups eyeball them, though I can't really see what they could determine just from looking at someone and talking to them through an interpreter. Anyway, technically they could refuse any ALTs, or the entire contract, based on this meeting, though from what I hear that rarely happens. If they like what they see, they officially sign the contract for the rest of the school year. This is what we did this semester, because this was Heart School's first contract in Koshigaya.
For people that have already been teaching in the city, they don't have to go through the interview process, but they're not guaranteed a job after a given school year. The BoE determines right after the final semester of a year whether they'll renew their old contracts or go for some combination of new companies and JETs. Their criteria for renewal are their opinion of the ALTs of a company and the price of their contract, in which order I don't know. If they got too many complaints about the ALTs of a company, they'll probably drop the contract unless it's ridiculously cheap.
So back to me: I said earlier that I was thinking of staying, but only if I could stay in the same schools that I have now, or at least roughly so (the elementaries might change a little since there's tons of those, but keeping the same middle school for sure). Up until today I wasn't really sure if there would be any way to request to stay at a school and know the result far enough in advance to not commit to staying there another year. I wouldn't want to make a decision to stay, put off any kind of America plans, then find out that I've been assigned to some totally different school system, possibly in a different city even. But since I also found out today that the break between school years is about 2 weeks (yes, I didn't mistype that), I decided that there's really no way for me to get stuck here in a school that I don't want. Here's how.
Right now, I'm in a "guest house", which is normally used for short-term living. It's cheap and you can walk out at any time without any real repercussions like you would get from breaking an apartment lease, which in Japan is about a thousand times worse than America. Since the period between my contract ending and the next school year starting is a matter of weeks, I can just renew my guest house lease another month and hang around to see whether
(a)my company gets their contract renewed, and
(b)I stay in the same city (99% chance), and
(c)the BoE puts me in my preferred schools.
If it turns out that I get different schools, which I should know within the first week of school, I can see "Sayounara" (probably the first time in history that a white person would be saying that in the correct context when leaving a company) and leave with no financial repercussions. I can then take a couple of weeks to do some sightseeing before heading back to America. I will tell both my company and the BoE that this is what I plan to do. Normally I wouldn't think placing ultimatums would be too great of an idea for someone with my tenuous job security to do, but since I'm perfectly happy leaving if I don't get the situation I want, I really don't care if it causes them to drop me. If they know in advance that I'll leave if I don't get my preference, then it's their own fault if they're stuck without an ALT when I walk out on them.
If, however, I DO get my schools again, I can leave the guest house after the month is up and get an apartment in this area and everything's dandy. I might even get a nicer bike!
So what this means is that I need to be totally sure that I'll stay if I do in fact get my schools again, since I think it would be pretty terrible to have them accept my terms only for me to walk out anyway. I figure I should decide by the beginning of the spring semester (actually trimester) whether or not this will be my course of action. I should definitely meet with one of the BoE people early in the semester to make sure they know well enough in advance that they can take my situation into account before making any final contract or placement decisions. I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on how that goes.
---------
Man that's a lot of words, and I didn't even get to a bunch of the stuff I wanted to. Well, stay tuned for the next few entries where I get advice from a guy teaching elementary school in America, and where a fight breaks out in my hallway and the cops come to sort it out.
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Big News?
It's been a little bit since I last posted because I've either been too busy after work or just too tired to write anything substantial. But now I'm sitting here at 1am with a bunch of caffeine on board (I really hate how my body won't get any kind of effect from caffeine until at least 3 hours after I ingest it) and not being able to go to sleep, so I figured it would be a good time to share my thoughts on some stuff. This is probably going to be pretty long, so brace yourself. Some of this is kind of big news and I would normally relay it in person or by phone, but with the whole international calls barrier I think it's better just to post it here. Besides, I get my serious thoughts across a lot better in words anyway.
First off, my enjoyment of this job has all of the sudden just skyrocketed. I'm not sure if it's just the kids getting comfortable with me, causing them to be more active in the class; if it's me getting more comfortable with the kids, causing me to have more motivation and energy; if it's me understanding my roles in elementary and middle schools better; if it's me just getting better at the job; or a combination of all the above (most likely). Even the middle school kids have been quite a bit more pumped up overall in the last few weeks, and middle school was pretty much the main downfall of the job, so basically all the "obstacles" for me liking this job are either being removed or are gone completely--except for the fact that the pay is pretty pathetic. It's kind of strange going to bed and actually looking forward to going to work. In all my years of schooling, the occasions where I didn't despise getting up and going to school were so rare that they may as well not have existed. It's a totally new feeling to be sitting there Sunday night not going "Man, only five more days till the weekend", and as you can imagine, it's pretty nice. It's also nice having some kind of routine or advance knowledge of what's going to happen during the day. It's hard enough going into a new job in a field that you're familiar with, because no two places have the same bosses, the same procedures, etc. It's even harder to go into a totally new field with all the above. Now throw in that you don't even speak the same language as 99% of the people there, AND that their culture is hugely different in pretty unpredictable ways, and you can see how frustrating and mind-boggling it would be at the beginning. But now I'm starting to get some stuff figured out, and I'm feeling like I know my place and I know how to not step on anyone's toes, so my anxiety in that area is lower too.
So as a direct consequence of this, I've decided that there's a possibility, though at this point it's minimal, that I'll renew my contract for another year. Even before I got the job, I had always assumed that I would have no reason to stay beyond the initial contract. The up and down nature of the first two months or so only solidified that thought. But it really does seem like every single day that goes by, I like the job more and more, and the fact that I think it's rooted in comfort levels makes me think that it can be even better next year when I go into the school on Day 1 already knowing the vast majority of the students and not having to go through this tedious introduction phase. There are people that I pass in the halls who light up and say "OH, KYLE!" when a month ago they would barely acknowledge me even after I said hi to them, and all the time more and more kids are having their timidness worn away and having the same transformation.
There are other reasons that I'm thinking of staying, which are rooted in another big topic: what I'm doing when I get back to America for good, whenever that will be. The more I think about it, the less I think the technology field is going to be what I want to do for the rest of my life. For one, as much as I enjoy computers and electronics and think that I'm pretty good with messing around with them on a basic level, I really just kind of went through the motions for my classes in college, and never really enjoyed anything beyond a brief moment at the beginning of some classes. I enjoyed the computer hardware ones the most, but when it actually got down to the senior level classes where the material began to approach what I would actually see in real life, I got completely turned off. Trying to read a computer science book is pretty much repulsive to me now. Ditto with reading stuff about circuits or lower level physics stuff with transistors. It's all fine and good when I read a short little snippet or blurb of some technical article, but trying to get deep into it just wears my mind down to the point that I have to just stop reading.
So if I'm not planning on getting a job in what my degree is in, then what am I going to do? Well, my current thinking is (brace yourselves)...teaching. Yes, quite a switch from computer science, but obviously not so much considering my current occupation. I know some of you are throwing up in your mouth a little considering the kind of horror stories you hear about teaching in America, but right now, it seems like one of the only jobs that I would have any kind of enjoyment with when I leave this country. I'm specifically leaning towards elementary. I've done a bit of research already on what I would need to do education-wise to be a teacher, and technically all I need is a bachelor's degree and a passing score on a state certification test. But not only is that highly recommended against, I don't want to do it anyway, because I'd actually be more likely to just get a second bachelor's degree.
Let me explain. Since I already have a ton of core curriculum classes from my CS degree, essentially the first two years of the teaching degree would be taken care of off the bat. Next, the financial aspect is not going to be much of a problem, partially because I'd only be going for two years or so, and partially because there are a TON of grants and scholarhips for teaching majors because of the huge shortage of teachers all over the place. Not only that, but when I'm 23 I can declare myself as financially independent, which, when considering how little my annual income would be, means I would get a completely ridiculous amount of free money after the various free-money-handing-out organisations would look at my FAFSA report (see: www.fafsa.ed.gov) and conclude that I am a bum living in a cardboard box eating the old doughnuts that they throw out behind Wal-Mart. Staying here another year has a lot to do with this, because I wouldn't actually be able to declare myself independent until 2008, since their ridiculous rules say that you have to be 23 before Jan. 1st of the year for which you're seeking aid to do so. Not only would staying open up that floodgate of money, but I'd also be able to save money by working here and getting various bonuses for renewing my contract and so on. Plus in the breaks between semesters I can work part-time at private schools to make more money, then take a week or so to go do more sightseeing in the country.
The big advantage of going the whole way and getting the degree is that I would really like to do a student teacher program like UNT has. You go for a whole year (your senior year, taking one or two classes concurrently but going to schools full-time) as a student teacher to a local elementary school getting real-life experience with all the curriculum planning, grading, and other stuff that you wouldn't get just by watching a few classes and talking with veteran teachers. That way, if it turned out that I was totally mistaken about my feelings and desire for the job, I would only have wasted maybe two years of schooling and not much money. Otherwise I would be so ridiculously prepared for the job that I would take it by storm more than pretty much anyone in the history of teaching has. I mean, who else would have several years of actual experience with kids spanning grades 1-9 before starting his absolute first official day as a teacher?
Anyway, I know that's a ton of information to be digesting at once, but I think it's all interconnected enough that it's best to just lay it all down on the table. I've been thinking about this stuff night and day recently, and I needed to get it all written down to not only get people caught up, but just to sort it out for myself. I'll be writing clarifications and stuff later when I look back tomorrow in a clear-headed state and go "What was this crap that I wrote?"
It's now 2:30a and I think I'll try to go to sleep, if Noli's freaky snoring doesn't keep me up even longer.
First off, my enjoyment of this job has all of the sudden just skyrocketed. I'm not sure if it's just the kids getting comfortable with me, causing them to be more active in the class; if it's me getting more comfortable with the kids, causing me to have more motivation and energy; if it's me understanding my roles in elementary and middle schools better; if it's me just getting better at the job; or a combination of all the above (most likely). Even the middle school kids have been quite a bit more pumped up overall in the last few weeks, and middle school was pretty much the main downfall of the job, so basically all the "obstacles" for me liking this job are either being removed or are gone completely--except for the fact that the pay is pretty pathetic. It's kind of strange going to bed and actually looking forward to going to work. In all my years of schooling, the occasions where I didn't despise getting up and going to school were so rare that they may as well not have existed. It's a totally new feeling to be sitting there Sunday night not going "Man, only five more days till the weekend", and as you can imagine, it's pretty nice. It's also nice having some kind of routine or advance knowledge of what's going to happen during the day. It's hard enough going into a new job in a field that you're familiar with, because no two places have the same bosses, the same procedures, etc. It's even harder to go into a totally new field with all the above. Now throw in that you don't even speak the same language as 99% of the people there, AND that their culture is hugely different in pretty unpredictable ways, and you can see how frustrating and mind-boggling it would be at the beginning. But now I'm starting to get some stuff figured out, and I'm feeling like I know my place and I know how to not step on anyone's toes, so my anxiety in that area is lower too.
So as a direct consequence of this, I've decided that there's a possibility, though at this point it's minimal, that I'll renew my contract for another year. Even before I got the job, I had always assumed that I would have no reason to stay beyond the initial contract. The up and down nature of the first two months or so only solidified that thought. But it really does seem like every single day that goes by, I like the job more and more, and the fact that I think it's rooted in comfort levels makes me think that it can be even better next year when I go into the school on Day 1 already knowing the vast majority of the students and not having to go through this tedious introduction phase. There are people that I pass in the halls who light up and say "OH, KYLE!" when a month ago they would barely acknowledge me even after I said hi to them, and all the time more and more kids are having their timidness worn away and having the same transformation.
There are other reasons that I'm thinking of staying, which are rooted in another big topic: what I'm doing when I get back to America for good, whenever that will be. The more I think about it, the less I think the technology field is going to be what I want to do for the rest of my life. For one, as much as I enjoy computers and electronics and think that I'm pretty good with messing around with them on a basic level, I really just kind of went through the motions for my classes in college, and never really enjoyed anything beyond a brief moment at the beginning of some classes. I enjoyed the computer hardware ones the most, but when it actually got down to the senior level classes where the material began to approach what I would actually see in real life, I got completely turned off. Trying to read a computer science book is pretty much repulsive to me now. Ditto with reading stuff about circuits or lower level physics stuff with transistors. It's all fine and good when I read a short little snippet or blurb of some technical article, but trying to get deep into it just wears my mind down to the point that I have to just stop reading.
So if I'm not planning on getting a job in what my degree is in, then what am I going to do? Well, my current thinking is (brace yourselves)...teaching. Yes, quite a switch from computer science, but obviously not so much considering my current occupation. I know some of you are throwing up in your mouth a little considering the kind of horror stories you hear about teaching in America, but right now, it seems like one of the only jobs that I would have any kind of enjoyment with when I leave this country. I'm specifically leaning towards elementary. I've done a bit of research already on what I would need to do education-wise to be a teacher, and technically all I need is a bachelor's degree and a passing score on a state certification test. But not only is that highly recommended against, I don't want to do it anyway, because I'd actually be more likely to just get a second bachelor's degree.
Let me explain. Since I already have a ton of core curriculum classes from my CS degree, essentially the first two years of the teaching degree would be taken care of off the bat. Next, the financial aspect is not going to be much of a problem, partially because I'd only be going for two years or so, and partially because there are a TON of grants and scholarhips for teaching majors because of the huge shortage of teachers all over the place. Not only that, but when I'm 23 I can declare myself as financially independent, which, when considering how little my annual income would be, means I would get a completely ridiculous amount of free money after the various free-money-handing-out organisations would look at my FAFSA report (see: www.fafsa.ed.gov) and conclude that I am a bum living in a cardboard box eating the old doughnuts that they throw out behind Wal-Mart. Staying here another year has a lot to do with this, because I wouldn't actually be able to declare myself independent until 2008, since their ridiculous rules say that you have to be 23 before Jan. 1st of the year for which you're seeking aid to do so. Not only would staying open up that floodgate of money, but I'd also be able to save money by working here and getting various bonuses for renewing my contract and so on. Plus in the breaks between semesters I can work part-time at private schools to make more money, then take a week or so to go do more sightseeing in the country.
The big advantage of going the whole way and getting the degree is that I would really like to do a student teacher program like UNT has. You go for a whole year (your senior year, taking one or two classes concurrently but going to schools full-time) as a student teacher to a local elementary school getting real-life experience with all the curriculum planning, grading, and other stuff that you wouldn't get just by watching a few classes and talking with veteran teachers. That way, if it turned out that I was totally mistaken about my feelings and desire for the job, I would only have wasted maybe two years of schooling and not much money. Otherwise I would be so ridiculously prepared for the job that I would take it by storm more than pretty much anyone in the history of teaching has. I mean, who else would have several years of actual experience with kids spanning grades 1-9 before starting his absolute first official day as a teacher?
Anyway, I know that's a ton of information to be digesting at once, but I think it's all interconnected enough that it's best to just lay it all down on the table. I've been thinking about this stuff night and day recently, and I needed to get it all written down to not only get people caught up, but just to sort it out for myself. I'll be writing clarifications and stuff later when I look back tomorrow in a clear-headed state and go "What was this crap that I wrote?"
It's now 2:30a and I think I'll try to go to sleep, if Noli's freaky snoring doesn't keep me up even longer.
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