Changeover
Most schools are swapping out staff, polishing the floors, shredding old test materials, and leaving their teachers (and ALTs) bored out of their minds while we wait for school sessions to start fresh again. It occurred to me that I should be getting some mail soon from the prefectural BOE, because my schedule just finished. When I arrived in Japan, I was given a schedule from September of 2006 through March of 2007. As I picked it up to throw it away, I was reflecting on the visits. I had a total of 51 non-Hakatajima school visits. Here’s the breakdown.
I went to the bigger schools more than the branch schools. The school that received the most attention was the mainland academic school, Imabari West High School - which I visited 13 times. The other mainland school, Imabari South High School, got 10 visits. Imabari South High School’s branch school on Oshima (to which I refer accordingly as Oshima High School) received 6 visits. That seems to be the standard. Hakata High School’s branch school on Iwagi got 6, and Imabari North High School’s branch school on Omishima (which I call Omishima High School) also got 6 visits. Yuge High School got 10 visits. The remainder of my time was spent at Hakata, which I calculate to be a total of…90 days. (I subtracted the weekends, holidays, and other school visits appropriately.) Altogether, that comes to 141 days at school. (In America, I would be 78.3% through an academic schoolyear.) Time has really flown by. Is anyone else looking back on their old schedules with a bit of nostalgia, wonderment, and relief? Ha ha. I look forward to getting my new schedule too. This time around, I expect only 6 schools (since Iwagi branch closed down), but perhaps I’ll get more visitation dates? I’ll let you know when I know.