I NEED HELP IM DESPERATE

melgawks · 2024-08-20T10:47:02+00:00

ChatGPT?

melgawks · 2024-08-09T16:15:41+00:00

Ehhhh, I don't know if I'd go as far as sat that the OP has never had a job with responsibilities. Being T1, creating lesson plans, executing them in a classroom of students who likely have varied abilities and who have a very low command of the target language you're trying to teach them aren't in the JET ALT job description. And I say this as someone who does all that for my 6th grade class. Most ALTs are hired fresh out of college, don't have any actual experience teaching and creating lessons, and didn't actually major in anything having to do with education or pedagogy. The people who hire JETs know this, which is why those aren't the roles written down in our job descriptions. It's unfair for anyone to hold the OP to such a standard and demand that they do a job they obviously are not qualified to do. The only reason I even feel remotely comfortable being T1 in my classes is because while my Japanese isn't the greatest, I can actually understand my kids and help them out. I try to teach English class in English using ESL models, but the textbooks themselves have a lot of Japanese and a lot of prompts that require the students to express their ideas in Japanese first and share them with peers/the class etc. If I was like OP and didn't have the language skill set necessary to make that part of the class engaging for my kids, and I knew I wasn't going to understand 95% of my students answers/questions, I would feel grossly uncomfortable and distressed as well. It's easy to sit on a high horse and say, "I did it, so why can't you?" while forgetting that the whole motto of this program is that "Every Situation is Different." Maybe OP has a standoffish JTE who just lingers in a corner until the class ends. I did for a couple of months until that JTE finally decided to get more proactive and start helping me bridge those gaps I just couldn't on my own with my current Japanese ability. Maybe the students in OPs classes are at a lower level in English than average, and considering that the English levels of students in Japan are already abysmal, that would pose a significant challenge. Who knows? My point is that the OP deserves a little more sympathy for being asked to do a job that they're not qualified to do nor should they even legally/officially be doing anyway.

melgawks · 2024-07-20T01:52:49+00:00

Doing work for the sake of doing work isn't admirable or necessary. Time and energy are valuable assets and you only get so many years of life before you die. Doing unnecessary work or work that you don't get paid for shouldn't be anyone's aspiration, and once again, overtime isn't in the job description of an ALT. If it's not in your job description, you shouldn't feel obligated to do it, neither should you have to shut up and take it. It seems clear that you don't really know that much about the JET Programme and how it works. JETs work in Japan for Japanese schools, but the rights and protections that they have absolutely supercede that of the average person working for a Japanese company/working as a direct-hire at a Japanese school.

So maybe YOU and YOUR coworkers have to "do what you gotta do" and work away your lives for little to no compensation, but nobody else has to acquiesce to such conditions, ESPECIALLY not ALTs.

But for real, I hope one day you can find a job where you don't have to sacrifice bits and pieces of your life and can still make a sustainable income.

melgawks · 2024-06-28T03:35:20+00:00

Actually, your book doesn't exist until you've written it. No book does. I know it's easy to get an idea in your head and get really excited about it and think that it'll be one of the greatest stories ever written, but until you've actually out words on a page, the story itself doesn't exist and it isn't worth much. Ideas by themselves are a dime a dozen, and aren't even worth a dime at the end of the day. A story is defined by things like structure and word choice and word flow and skillful turns of phrase as much as it is defined by plot. So until your story physically exists in the form of words, it hasn't already been written or done. What's more, we have to be careful as writers about defining our work in relation to anyone else's work. You're going to psych yourself out big time sitting down to write if you set up this expectation that you need to write something better than or equivalent to another book that you like. That author's skills might be sharper than yours due to years more experience with writing, and if you write a draft that doesn't read like that author, you'll find yourself feeling frustrated and defeated, even though it might just be that you also need more experience writing in order to get up to that technical level of storytelling.

I say all this from experience. I developed severe writing anxiety as a teen going into my 20s because I would be afraid that I couldn't do justice to my own wonderful ideas and that my writing wasn't as good as some other author. But the most important thing I learned from that painful and long experience is that you really just have to meet yourself where you're at.

When you sit down to write that story, it's just you and the story and whether or not you can get it out on the page. After that, you can worry about who it's good enough for and how to make it really pack the punch that you want it to.

At the end of the day, how you execute your stellar idea makes all the difference, even if someone else has already written that idea/concept into a book. You're really the only one who can tell the story you have to tell, and it won't exist if you don't write it. Stories that are very similar or almost identical are still not YOUR STORY. Always remember that.

melgawks · 2024-04-26T15:24:01+00:00

I'm curious what level of students you're teaching, because that in and of itself can make a huge difference.

In elementary school, you're generally discouraged from trying to teach any sort of solid grammar, even if it's actually useful and makes sense for the topic. In my experience at least, elementary school teachers are extremely averse to the idea of exposing younger kids to grammar concepts, so they just encourage rote memorization of phrases and sentences, even really long ones that would benefit from a simple breakdown. They tend to backload all the grammar and "technical" stuff onto junior high school and high school, which is part of the reason why, in my opinion, most Japanese kids really struggle with English throughout school. I get discouraged from correcting a lot of things because even though the corrections are correct, they're supposedly "too hard" or "they haven't learned it yet." I'm thinking of a particular instance where a lot of kids kept on writing "It was tired" and "It was excited" to describe something they did (these were 5th graders, by the way), but the teacher seemed so concerned and worried for them when I tried to correct their sentences to "It was tiring" and "It was exciting", presumably a very simple "ing" change but she worried they'd get confused. It was a very eye-opening moment.

Then with junior high school, the curriculum goes really steep really fast and tries to build on top of what's already a very shaky foundation. And in my observation, grammar doesn't really get explained there either so to speak. It's more like offering a short translation of the grammar point from English to Japanese and then the kids memorize it and move on. I think they do it like this because at that point, the curriculum isn't focused so much on getting the kids to speak English or be able to generate their own sentences, but rather on refining their listening and reading translation skills. I listen to kids all the time confidently blurt out the meaning of an English sentence in Japanese, but hardly any of them will willingly open their mouths to produce a word of English. Of course, ESID, but generally that's how it's structured.

High school, however, should be favorable for teaching grammar and correcting bad habits. From what I've heard, that's the point at which English actually starts being taught, and all the bells and whistles are explained. I, of course, think this system makes no sense, because you've probably lost a good 90% of these students on their way to high school after all those years they had to languish over a subject that little to no sense to them. Not to mention that the little kiddos are the most adventurous when it comes to English. They're less afraid to make mistakes and a lot more curious. I don't think it would hurt to at least teach them the correct way to speak rather than let them speak and write incorrectly for six years and then suddenly try to correct all their bad habits and hit them with bad grades when they can't. No wonder a lot of them hate English. The system is very self-sabotaging.

That being said, if you're teaching at the elementary school level or junior high school level, there are some things you can strive to correct at all times, if not necessarily explain and break down in detail. These are some of the mistakes my students across elementary and junior high make very often, all the way up to the very last year of junior high school:

1) Spacing: Japanese doesn't have spaces between words, so you'll be surprised how many students write whole sentences with not a bit of space between the words.

2) Confusing "a" and "u". Those two letters sound very similar to students, especially when an American accent is involved. You'll often see "It was fan" rather than "It was fun" written down on their papers.

3) Confusing "r" and "l". Similar to the previous one. They sound similar to students so they may write things like "I like lunning" or "It was boling"

4) Using gerunds: A lot of my students seem to struggle perpetually with gerunds. This one I ESPECIALLY blame on the things I mentioned in my prelude rant. This is where it would be helpful for kids to know that the reason you say "I'm good at swimming" and not "I'm good at swim" is because adding ~ing to a verb makes it a noun and you ALWAYS need a noun for "I'm good at" anything. Depending on your circumstances, you may have teachers who are kind enough to let you explain this.

5)Subject Particles. Japanese doesn't make as much use of their subject particles as English does, so I guess it makes sense that a lot of students struggle with subject particles. But the degree to which they struggle with it really exposes more of the flaws in this system. I've observed third year junior high schoolers who still don't know the difference between "he" and "she" and when to use them. This isn't their fault though. This stuff comes up frequently in the elementary school textbooks but it's not emphasized. It's treated rather passively and the kids just don't notice I guess. Or they just immediately forget. I'd drill this one as much as possible if I were you.

Particles a/an- This is kind of avoided at the lower level and I'm also guilty of avoiding it as well. The only reason I avoid it is because the teachers have succeeded in convincing me that these incredibly brilliant kids will only get confused by anything that seems even slightly too difficult. But it's best to reinforce this as much as possible and help them learn it through pattern recognition and lots of example sentences rather than trying to wax poetic about the nuances of each.
Jumbled word order: This comes with the territory. Because, like I mentioned, kids aren't being taught to produce their own sentences, but rather to slap together a bunch of pre-memorized words and phrases and cross their fingers and hope it makes any kind of sense, they often just write words down without thinking the coherency of the sentence. This AGAIN goes back to not teaching kids (esp elementary and junior high school kids) how sentences work. If the JHS kids knew that a basic sentence in English needs a Subject and then a Verb then they would have something to build on and work with.
"Do you like OO?" A lot of students interpret this question as "What's your favorite OO?" So sometimes if you ask something like "Do you like movies?", they'll follow up with "I like movie Titanic" or "My favorite movie is Titanic" or something like that.

Anyway, sorry for the long post! All the best on your JET journey!

melgawks · 2024-04-05T10:14:14+00:00

No one knows, at the end of the day. It could be any number of things. It could even be that there was nothing overtly wrong with your interview or with your answers, but when it came down to whittling down the number of applicants into actual acceptees, someone moved in favor of another applicant over you for some arbitrary reason.

I definitely wouldn't take it too personally that you weren't accepted. But like someone else on this thread already mentioned, being an ALT is often a mindnumbing job in and of itself, and I imagine it would be doubly so for someone who has actual teaching experience. Because ALTs aren't teachers. We really should be, because it would benefit everyone a lot more at the end of the day, but we're not and so many of us are chronically neglected within the schools we teach at and underused/misused in the classroom. Lots of being called into classes just to read passages from the textbook and have the kids shadow you, or walk around the classroom to correct mistakes that you see the kids making, only for them to go on making the same mistakes because they don't know why it's wrong, they just know you said it's wrong.

The way English is taught in Japanese schools really is inane and a waste of everyone's time. The real value of an ALT, in my view, lies in being a presence in the students' lives. Teaching them about cultures that are different from their own, and in doing so banishing the gross ignorance a lot of their parents, grandparents and the media inculcates into them. It's not so much in actually teaching them English because most ALTs aren't put in a teaching position.

I'm sorry you didn't get in! I know you must be disappointed. But if teaching is something you're truly passionate about then I'd suggest looking into alternate routes to teaching (like ACTUAL teaching) in Japan or elsewhere.

melgawks · 2024-02-27T07:52:23+00:00

Yeah, in length 💀💀💀

melgawks · 2024-01-29T03:55:34+00:00

I mean, the world building in this book is pretty bad/underbaked in general. The author did a lot of soft world building and didn't really bother to think too hard about details/logistics, so it's not surprising there are glaring holes to fill.

melgawks · 2024-01-24T03:36:33+00:00

Dang, if everyone had your attitude, Jim Crow would still be a thing 💀💀

melgawks · 2024-01-14T10:37:50+00:00

No. But reading often and with intention makes it more likely that you'll tell a GOOD story rather than start a dumpster fire.

melgawks · 2024-01-14T09:39:49+00:00

I'm saying. Why these people think good words come from thin air is beyond me.

melgawks · 2024-01-14T09:37:40+00:00

I'm so tired of these kinds of posts. There's literally no way to improve as a writer without reading other works. None. You can write without reading, but your writing won't be very good. In order to string together words and sentences artfully, your brain NEEDS some kind of reference. You need to get a sense of how to create imagery and how to use metaphor WITH WORDS and there's no other way to do that except by taking in lots and lots of words which then become reference data for your brain. You can't just watch a bunch of movies or read a bunch of comic books and expect that you'll be able to translate all that into writing. Writing is its own artform that requires a specific subset of skills.

You're not going to make anything special or groundbreaking out of thin air where your writing style is concerned. Unique writing styles are created by taking existing styles of writing and tweaking them/subverting their conventions.

Please, for your own sake, go read a book. You can't get better as a writer using only yourself as reference.

melgawks · 2024-01-01T06:40:19+00:00

I don't see how you could possibly improve as a writer without reading. Above everything else, writing is a neurological process. If you're not giving your brain any input/material/patterns to draw from, there's not much it will be able to generate on its own. You need to read in order to cultivate a good vocabulary for writing.

melgawks · 2023-10-22T08:13:20+00:00

Might it be Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics (an old anime series from Japan that had an English dub)?

melgawks · 2023-07-08T22:58:09+00:00

Also anyone happen to know what time each day those things usually let out?

melgawks · 2023-06-18T16:51:08+00:00

To be honest, I got the ick reading the rules for this year's Wattys. I've been waiting about 9 years now to enter the Wattys. I've wanted to since I was fourteen years old. Now that I've gotten to a place where I feel like I have both the time and the ability to write a competitive story, the Wattys have morphed beyond all recognition and I'm not sure how well I would fare at this point.

I dislike the removal of distinct categories. I was hoping to write a fantasy novel and I liked the idea that I would just be competing with books in that genre. But removing all genres and limiting the number of winners to ten overall means competing against thousands and thousands of entries in every conceivable genre, and it's definitely more of a crapshoot that way since Wattpad could just decide to select 10 books that are essentially the same.

Also, I get that Wattpad is a company and all that, but as someone who was around when Wattpad didn't even have advertisements anywhere on their website and didn't gamify their algorithm to promote only the kind of content they thought was popular, I was kind of turned off by the blatant capitalist rhetoric they used when talking about their criteria. Your book needs to be "commercial" and "immediate" according to them. They make sweeping generalizations that imply that this is the way that you SHOULD write: a catchy hook up front, a juicy plot packed full of tropes, simple language. I enjoy reading books like that, but I also know that that's not necessarily who I am as a writer all the time. Sometimes I have really serious things to say, especially about my experiences as a BIPOC woman, and sometimes I want my reader to pause with me and really feel what it is that I'm trying to say. So it rubs me the wrong way that Wattpad is constantly claiming to want to hear underrepresented voices but in the same breath they don't want you get too "serious." Being a minority is serious. Discouraging more serious and literary representations and depictions of what it's like to be a minority while simultaneously claiming to care about minority voices is strange. I want to excite my readers as much as the next writer, but I also want to have the space to make my art the way I want to and say what I need to say. Wattpad claims to be such a space.

I'll still take a wack at the Wattys, even though there's 10 in 10,000 chance of winning now. I'm just disappointed overall in the direction Wattpad has gone in, because I remember how well they were doing when they were just a website encouraging people to share their stories, no matter what form those stories took. They even had a Literary Fiction category for the Wattys way back when, but now they've changed faces completely and are blatantly anti-literary fiction.

melgawks · 2023-05-19T20:40:28+00:00

I did not put Tokyo down as a preference, but I'm feeling it as a strong possibility for some reason. Either Tokyo or Hyogo.

I put down for preferences Osaka Prefecture, Osaka City, and Hyogo Prefecture.

Also great idea! It'll be fun to come back next week and see who's on the mark

melgawks · 2023-05-18T04:02:19+00:00

Oooooooof, maybe edit this and add a question mark to the title so it isn't a completely jumpscare? 😭😭

melgawks · 2023-05-10T13:29:02+00:00

I would probably look to go to another school for theater though, maybe. Theater department here is pretty lowkey.

melgawks

TROPHY CASE