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Now that I’ve finished writing about our recent travels, I’m going to start writing quick posts whenever I can about our classes, our apartment, and other aspects of our life here in Numazu. Whenever I get a little bit more time, I’ll also be writing about anything else that’s going on here that may be interesting to everyone at home.

I’m going to begin with our job: we are full time English teachers at American Language Services in Numazu. For the most part, we really like the situation that we ended up in. Although the pay is slightly lower than that of many other English teachers, we have diverse schedules and a variety of students and classes. I have basically every kind of class you can think of - from nursery students (3 years old) to high schoolers to adult business classes. You may, like we initially did, think that this sounds difficult. However, because we teach eikaiwa, or English conversation, most of the classes take relatively little preparation and tend to be quite interesting. The majority of classes are adults and most of them speak enough English to hold an interesting conversation about their weekends, which is always the first thing we ask them about. After all, people everywhere talk most easily about themselves. Additionally, many of our classes are held on-site at businesses or other locations. While this means commuting time, it’s a huge benefit to us, as we get to see the inside of Japanese factories, businesses, homes and schools on a weekly basis. While our students learn English we are getting a valuable cultural lesson.

Of course, while the job is interesting, it does have its downsides. We work approximately 22 teaching hours a week - sounds good right? Actually, including two hours we’re required to work in the office a week and hours and hours of commuting time we easily make it to a traditional 40 hours a week. The timetable, however, is far from traditional - we are supposed to be available anytime between 8 am and 9 pm every day, which we found out means that we have classes from 8 am and until 9 pm almost every day. Since doing this everyday (as we did when we first arrived) was incredibly grueling we asked for several nights off a week and now we’re not required to work Monday or Wednesday after 5:00 pm. This has been a big relief and now we’re pretty happy with our working situation.

I’ll probably go into more detail about specific classes later, but for now I’ll leave it with this short introduction. Let me know if there’s anything specific you want to read about in the comments.