Teacher Training Program: Motivational Articles

Back in June I talked about starting a teacher training program for Japanese teachers, which you can read about here if you need a refresher. It was a bit of a whirlwind, and time did all sorts of wibbly wobbly tricks while I was there. Sometimes it was so fast, and others it felt like it would never end. 

After the first week, we really got into studying Japanese. We had been split into three classes of different abilities and we all studied different topics. I don't think I realised that at first, just assuming we were all doing the same kind of thing at our various levels. Kind of silly in hindsight. 

The first real piece of work that my class did was to consider why we were teachers. What was it that made us want to teach in the first place. Why did we keep coming to work each day now? We spent a whole week on this one topic. Our first lesson was talking about it with each other, then listening and reading examples of other people's stories. Finally we had to write our own article in Japanese. It was a pretty organic process, since we learnt new words and terminology as we progressed through speaking, listening and reading about the topic, and then had to use it in our own articles. 

I was really surprised by how my own answer to these questions changed over the week. I think teachers are often asked this at the start of a motivational speech, or some PD when the new school year begins, but we are only given minutes to answer, and then whoever asked it has moved on. And even if you've got a good answer, because you've got to summarise it into 30 seconds (or less), it feels much less impactful. My initial reason for becoming a teacher was a fairly selfish one; wanting to do what I liked to do (music and Japanese) and tell others about it. So different from why I'm doing what I'm doing now! 

Anyway, I was also really proud of the writing that I did; the whole article in Japanese! So I wanted to put it here to remind me. Not only of why I'm motivated to do what I do, but also that I can write all of this in Japanese! It's easy to feel like my language is slipping away when I'm not using it as much back in Australia, but hopefully this gives me the nudge that if it was possible once, it's possible again. All I have to do is keep showing up and moving forward.