Anyhow, to make a long story short, those who have read my posts know I teach full time at a private Junior High School, which is also linked to a college and high school. My main duties are at the Junior High School, but I also need to teach at the college 5 classes a week.
This job came by introduction/recommendation only, so I pretty much went from ALT to full time teacher/college teacher, without any training or experience teaching college whatsoever, and of course, no predetermined curriculum, textbooks, or any other English teachers working there(Japanese or otherwise) to at least give me some sort of support or advice...... I'm expected to build everything by myself, save a few notes/outlines left over from the previous teachers as a guide.
Needless to say, the first term was much like a monkey trying to fix a computer, but I managed to at least get students to finish a project and complete an end of term test so I could grade them. Already overloaded with JHS responsibilities, I ended up MEXTing up a few times during test time, needing to fix two students' scores.
Also, no one whatsoever mentioned the whole "6 times absent and they're out!!" rule, and assumed I "knew", until it was too late and I had already let a couple of over-absent students take the test.
Despite all this, I've entered the second term with a bit of learning experience, and have bought myself some textbooks of my own as a sort of loose "guide" for putting lessons and a makeshift "curriculum" together.....
Also the whole 90-minute lesson thing........ It's pretty standard procedure for college, but for me, 90 minutes is brutal for an ESL class!!! If even I start feeling sleepy after the sixty minute mark, imagine the students!!!
Students have said to me that I'm actually the only teacher in the whole school who doesn't end classes early, and as much as I'd love to do that, I really have no one whatsoever to touch base with on that, and continue teaching full classes.... I guess I should just ask kocho-sensei, though he's the type who likes to pretend to speak more English than he does, and rarely gives me any kind of direct answer, and the majority of the simplest questions I've asked have just made me feel like an idiot wasting my own time.
Anyhow, are their any kind of pointers or advice for greenhorn dark-stumblers such as myself???
