Today I had a training seminar to go to around 10 a.m., and no classes. The training was near the Hankyu Nishinomiya station – just a few minutes walk north. I got there with a few minutes to spare, and talked a little bit with some of the other ALTs that were early like me.
The training was pretty simple. I think the meeting was really just to check in and make sure everyone’s sanity was intact. Some of the ALTs have no experience, so we exchanged ideas and war stories, and they had a moderator hired by the company to move things along. It took about two hours to complete, and we were out the door.
Afterwards, some of us went out to lunch at an Indian restaurant, and it was quite an interesting conversation. There were three veterans of the ALT biz (myself included), and three rookies. One guy with very little experience lectured us, one guy asked all kinds of questions, and the other guy ate his lunch and barely said a word. It was a weird lunch. Maybe it’s a sign of me getting too used to living in Japan, but I was very conscious of the noise that some of the guys were making at our table, and I noticed how everyone was watching us from other tables.
The conversation was fun, though. The veteran guys would tease one of the rookies a little bit, and he was taking everything so literally he wasn’t getting the jokes. I was smiling at some of the things they were joking about the whole trip back home. The one consistent theme among the veterans was that they didn’t want to do this job the rest of their lives, and the theme among the rookies was what they could do with all the free time they find themselves with.
We have another training day on Thursday, so it’ll be the same group for another two hour session. I’m interested to see how that one goes.
On the way home I picked up some tonkatsu for our dinner tonight, and looked at some books at the bookstore, but didn’t buy anything. Since I was home early I’ve been studying and enjoying some extra free time at home. Tomorrow I’ve got a full slate of classes, and the students will be tired from the city-wide sports event that they participated in today. It might be a little tough to rouse them long enough to study English.
