Observations!

Yesterday and today were/are observation days at one of my schools: Kaminakazuma. This means that the main board of education for the city (aka Souken) sends some of their people to come observe our classes and make sure that we are living up to their standards.

When I first heard they were doing this, my reaction was "oh, ok, so we're gonna do class just as normal but have a few extra people watching." It would not have been the first time that people would come in and watch.....it actually happens almost every day at one of my schools (Tsumasato....not the one Souken is coming to).....well the people dont necessarily come to watch, but there are two rooms attached to my room, one for PTA and the other for whatever they want to use it for. So people walk through my room during class to go to meetings in these other rooms pretty much daily. And there have been the random occasions that people did come in specifically to watch the class.

What I did not realize was that because these observation days were Souken observations, it's a big deal!!

This past week my teachers have pretty much been freaking out. Tuesday was a rather frusrtating day for me because they would come and talk to me about the lesson plan every chance they got and they would repeat themselves 20 times and tell me what to do 20 times and tell me how we're gonna do the greeting that we've been doing the same every day for the past 3 months and they would tell me how to explain the game in English.....even though they've already explained the game to me so I already know whats going on. Tuesday was also the day that they changed a lot of my classes around and either forgot to tell the teacher who was supposed to come, or they forgot to tell me. So my first period I waited for a teacher who didn't know she was supposed to come and my second period a different class showed up than what I was prepared for.

Now, the reason they changed these classes around was because they wanted to get some "practice classes" in for the big day on Thursday. Not only did we have a practice class for each class that would be observed, the teachers also practiced the English from those classes with their kids in their own class time. So basically, the kids already knew exactly what we were going to be doing before the observed class, so when I was explaining the rules to the games in English, they were thinking "we already know this...can we play!" So of course the observers were very happy to see how well they understood and how well they could speak without help.

Yesterday....the observations themselves actually went really well....ofcourse! They were all planned out very well and really organized and we had gone over every little detail 20 times.....it would be pretty bad if after all that we still had a bad class!!

Later that day I got to have a "meeting" with the observers. We talked about the class....what went well, what didnt, some tips about how to teach different levels....it was a good meeting. At one point she asked me if I had any other questions. I went out on a limn and mentioned that I wasn't sure if the teachers knew I had a TEFL degree (I actually studied to do what I'm doing....which all the other AETs here havent because we are basically just assistants and the japanese teachers plan the classes and tell us what to do). I just said that because I studied teaching English, I would like to help the teachers more and I would like to help come up with activities.

So we will see if that makes any difference. Some teachers already let me do a lot and allow me to bring in game ideas. But some teachers really make me their assistant and only use me in class when they want to.

Ok, thats all for now. Now, as a treat for reading all about my "Observation Experience", here is a video from Youtube that might help you get a better idea of the level of English we deal with every day. Luckily we actually get to teach our kids the correct way instead of just laugh at them when they say it wrong, like what happens in this video. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yE44Rt_Ch_k&NR=1