It has been a long week of pressure and brutality, so it is hard to keep up to date info, but I will try to remember the main points.... To begin, I was the only one picked up at KIX on April 2nd because...well, I was late. I got through customs alright and made my way through the door with my luggage cart. I saw one of the trainers standing there waiting for me with the company`s name on a sign. I went to greet her, when I managed to tip over my luggage cart and send my belongings crashing to the ground. Wow, great first impression...at least it is out that I am clumsy! So after scrambling around and gathering everything again, I followed her to a shipment station to send my bags off to my school.. after a long train ride and a few changes, I found myself lugging my huge duffle bag up the stairs of Daikokucho station in Nanba. I turned the corner, passed a temple, rounded another dark corner, and there was my hotel. I got up to my room, and just as the trainer was dropping me off, my roommate appeared from the dark abyss of our room and startled us. We introduced ourselves and I found her to be a great person to room with.
I felt lucky to be able to see Kenji the next day, and it eased my nerves a bit to also meet all the other trainees in my group. However, when we all went to training the next day, the stress really started adding up. I was behind...not just a day behind everyone, but really behind mentally and physically. The first day was a 9 hour hell. I was jet lagged beyond belief and my thoughts were fuzzy and I could not keep up with all the notes and directions and lesson plan making, The next way was equally as awful, having to perform and have no confidence in my presentation, since I was utterly unprepared. I wasnt doing as terrible as I thought, but the mental strain of it all just got to be on the verge of too much. I wasnt getting how to run the lesson plans and memorize everything in order without actually LOOKING at my lesson plans... By Wednesday, I was just depressed, Utterly down on myself and disgusted with what I felt was a lack of progress in comparison with everyone else, I was in fear of my status and overly pressured to improve so much more... my friends in my training group tried to show more support and eventually I picked myself up to do the group lesson I was assigned. The good thing about training is it gives you room to make mistakes and be critiqued right away so you can learn from them....my biggest problem is still my lack of confidence. I ran the lesson, but clutched my lesson plan. I looked behind my practice students to see my evaluator holding up a sign that said [put down your lesson plan! } I disengaged myself from it and nervously continued, but it went better than I thought. The good points given to me after gave me more confidence, and then by the time our actual demo lesson in front of students rolled around, the knots in my stomach reduced to butterflies.
Meeting the students made me happy, so many of them were kind and thoroughly interested in learning more, I was still nervous when I stepped in front of the class to present, but as I passed the pre activity and went to the dialogue section, my confidence rose and I took hold. I felt like a teacher! It made me really think about how my life might be in the next week, and it made me excited about how great this job will be, TBC...
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