Dear diary...

So, it is the first day of my writing, although it is far from my first as a semi-working, aspiring teacher-to-be. Not a teacher, not a student, nor a member of the faculty in any other sense, my presence in the facilities of the school where I have been positioned is an affront to the very laws that govern the dynamics of any educational body.

Still, things carry on as they always do, and my presence has been filed away under "Inexplainable natural phenomena". This is good.

Being not a member of the faculty, I find myself often in the uncomfortable position of hearing both sides to any argument, without the ability to render judgement, give good advice or any kind of constructive feedback; only the option of sympathetically shaking my head in disbelief is present to me, and it has rendered my neck sore in the last few weeks.

While I would love to discuss any and all damage upon my self, that is not what this entry is going to be about, but rather the work I am actually intending to conduct, and what results, positive or not, they may bring.

But first, to establish mood and a plausible, believable scenario, I will give a brief summation of things as they are:

I am studying to become a teacher and have, through many miraculous twists and turns, made my way to the final year of my education. This, to some, may seem a monumentous achievement, but I guarantee you it is not. For in fact, up until spring 2010, I was not in fact studying to become a teacher, but instead merely an individual who had taken a Bachelor's Degree in English... with Japanese as a secondary subject.

Hardly teacher material, but there you have it. Spring 2010, however, saw me once more crawling back to the school bench after a term and a half working part-time in a warehouse (I ask that any snide remarks you may have regarding that subject, you keep it to yourself. It is not easy findign a job on a half-assed degree like that which I had), where working conditions were abysmal and the pay even worse.

Along with being a student trying to become a teacher, the teacher-student gets to play teacher, with the added bonus of having an existing teacher (who may or may not have a degree of their own) serving as their mentor and guide. This, naturally, seemed like a very good solution for me, and thus it was that I was assigned to a quaint little school in the slightly more well-off parts of the general area in which I live. This specific campus, for even in high school there have now been campuses cropping up here and there, had only somewhere between 30 and 40 students in all three years together, which to me hinted at a very close and tightly-knit group of teachers and students.

Not entirely off-mark, and during my first weeks serving as a non-existant anomality I observed, remarked, joked with my mentor and reeled at the growing expenses of eating in a restaurant 4-5 days a week. Intermingled, thankfully, with these sessions of defying the laws of nature, were seminars and lectures held to cement the core-belief in pedagogical theories of the week and writing pointless essays.

I shall not go into further detail about my school's activities last term, although I may well do so in a future post, merely to illustrate the despicable conditions of my education. However, with everything said and done, the term passed, my grades were good and I was happy.

Then came a rather uneventful summer, and then it was once more into the fray.

This term, unlike the last one, presented many more opportunities for me to pretend-teach, and thus many more opportunities for me to stand in front of 10-15 other people only a few years younger than myself. What distinguished these fine lads and lasses from myself was, thankfully, my rather splendid facial hair; hair that had up until only a few years ago been sparce and embarrassing, but now had matured enough for me to have something resembling a grown-up appearance. I strongly believe that my beard has aided me well in my pedagogical pursuits.

Now, only a few weeks into this term, I came to the realization that two first-year students had trouble with their English classes. Severe difficulties, even. This, I managed to discover after some rooting around, was because both children (I loathe this word, as they are hardly much younger than myself, and therefore I will use 'students' in the future) were both from parts of the world where English was not, in fact, taught that much in school. Ironically, while they were getting much better at the native language of their new homes (that would be the country in which I live), the fact that the English classes were generally held with our native language as a sort of scaffolding (HA! Vygotskij) tool for the students to fall back on, relying on a second-language to learn a third-language was clearly not a very good option for these students.

Other problems existed as well; cultural isolation, or rather, lack of cultural exposure, had made both students fairly bad at understanding spoken and written forms of English, at least at a rapid pace, which further served to widen the distance between them and the rest of their lucky classmates.

So, something obviously needed to be done. And I would do it.

At least, that was the idea-germ that came into my head said when I proposed it to my mentor, and she, thankfully, found it to be a most excellent idea.

So I set to work, gathering as much information as I could while I tried to figure out how to actually, you know, help these students learn English. Some of my most fundamental ideas were

• Increased exposure to English through Audial, Visual and Vocal means
• A study-pace set by the students in agreement with me, the teacher (abnormality)
• The usage of low-grade national exams in order to roughly gauge what level of English these students are comfortable and competent with.

To this end, I decided that television programs would be a key element in early language Exposure. However, viewing a half-an-hour episode, or even 42-minute episodes, would not be a viable option in school. With a promise of two hours a week, potentially three, I had to make sure that these hours were spent effectively. This meant homework.

Now, keep in my, I am not, and was not, an employee of the school I have been positioned. Technically, a student-teacher is never, EVER to conduct any form of education without their mentor present.

I broke these rules the first week of the previous term.

So, can I be blamed, in my youthful arrogance, that I perhaps did not fully consult my mentor when I set to work creating the proto-study plan that I would later present to her?

Oh sure, I wasn't isolating myself completely, my dear mentor was informed of my general ideas, and to the best of my memory she was also informed of the plan to have the students watch tv-episodes, in their homes, once a week.

Unfortunately, at that precise moment, my mentor decided not to listen to what I was telling her.

Alas, it seems, we make our biggest mistakes when we should be at our most attentive. So, time passed, I selected a handful of tv-series the students would be able to pick from (including Doctor Who, 24, Lost, Heroes, Firefly, My Name is Earl, to name a few) with short summaries of the series, and the first piece of homework being to select three of these shows and watch an episode of each before the final decision would be reached.

Part of the weekly homework would be for the students to watch an episode a week (the first week being exempt from this as they were to watch three episodes), write a short summary of what they felt happened during the show (later on we would perhaps focus on specific characters or elements in the film) and then present this, orally, to me and the other student. There would be no grading pressure, merely a well-meaning intent from me for these students to reach a level of understanding where the actual Course goals of the first term of English would be achievable for them.

This, however, was not okay with my mentor. In a surprising move that I can only describe as a pedagogical reach-around, she shot down my well-formed plan and angrily pronounced it still-born and deformed.

Anger boiled in my veins.

This was a dark time for me, and one I do not wish to further expand upon, but sufficient to say, I was for a while utterly discouraged of continuing my plans to help these poor students. Clearly, watching TV-episodes, even for the purpose of plain exposure, would be too much for these poor students. She had assumed, somehow, that I had intended to show these students, in class, short clips of 5-10 minutes. I cannot even think of where to begin describing how wrong this assumption was.

However, now, two weeks later... things are recovering.

What has happened since the death-declaration of my TV-show idea, you will find out in my next post, wherein I will also breach why my mentor's decision made me more angry than might seem necessary.