Yesterday Kuniko found out her assignment for next year – she’ll be a home room teacher for a junior high school class. For a lot of reasons this is not the best gig at her school, but it is the one she expected, and it didn’t really come as a surprise. <\/p>\n
She’ll be teaching the advanced level of junior high school English, and that kind of came as a surprise for me since I didn’t even know there was an advanced level. In Japan students first start learning English officially in junior high school, and Kuniko will be guiding students through what may be their first impression of English. My own experiences teaching English to junior high kids were pretty positive, but I think Kuniko will be in for a little bit of a jolt to her teaching style, as she usually works with much more mature learners. <\/p>\n
So the bad news is that teaching at the junior high level will mean no international school trips – next year the high school students are going to New Zealand and Canada, so Kuniko will miss out on that. Kuniko is a little bummed out because she has a very high skill level in English, she has a lot of experience and skills in passing high level English exams and using English in a career, and she’ll be singing songs and teaching the ABC’s. <\/p>\n
The good news is that working with younger students may produce some stress in some areas (like behavior) there is much less stress in other areas (like getting into colleges, taking extra weekend classes, exam interview practice, and parents constantly calling to check on their child’s progress towards graduation). Working with the junior high school students can be quite satisfying as they are full of energy and optimism, and are not embarrassed at all about trying to use English in class.<\/p>\n
I’m thinking that it will work out to be a pretty stress-free year and the biggest problem will be keeping Kuniko’s English skills sharp. We’ll see how things work out in the upcoming year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday Kuniko found out her assignment for next year – she’ll be a home room teacher for a junior high school class. For a lot of reasons this is not the best gig at her school, but it is the one she expected, and it didn’t really come as a surprise. She’ll be teaching the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-p5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}