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Eikaiwa no GEOS desu. Onegaishimasu!
Today I had my first experience at being one of those people standing outside the train station handing out tissue packets with advertisements in them! How exciting!
Well, actually to be honest I really wasn't looking forward to it at first. Today was a really cold day, and I was feeling really tired and zombie-like when I got to work, etc, and Eri was all like "Today we're doing tissues! YAY!" and I'm like "Oh geez yay whatever." But, the way the timing worked out it made the most sense for me and Duane to go out there around 3pm (Eri had a class then) and hand out tissues, so we did that. Duane told me it was going to be a bit of a humiliating experience, but we really need new students at our school, so it'd be good for us.
We got out there and put down our crate of tissues. I forget how many packets we had but Duane said, "We'll just do this for half an hour and see how many we can give away, and do the rest on Friday."
Now, personally, I know that I ignore 90% of the people giving out tissues/flyers in stations, and usually they ignore me too, so it's all good. I kind of expected a lot of people to ignore us too, and plenty of people did. BUT, there's got to be something strange about seeing a tall American white girl in a suit with a Canadian black guy both standing there with big silly grins on their face saying cheerfully, "Eikaiwa no GEOS desu! Eikaiwa no GEOS desu! Onegaishimasu! Onegaishimasu!" ("We're from GEOS English School! Please take this!") So I usually tried to catch people's eyes and THEN say it and hand them tissues.
Lots of people looked at us funny but most of them actually took the tissues. Some of them asked us questions. One time a bunch of high school boys were walking by. I gave them tissue packets and they started giggling at me, in that "Whoa the gaijin speaks Japanese" sort of way, so I laughed too and said in Japanese, "You should study English! Come to GEOS!" They laughed even more and ran off. It was funny.
Duane says I'm a natural. We got rid of the entire crate in 20 minutes.
I think we managed to pick a pretty busy time, and we spaced ourselves well so that I was getting people coming out of the station and he was getting people coming in. And I do have to admit that if we'd been out there much longer I would have probably started to die of either embarrassment or FREEZING COLD. But it wasn't so bad for just a little while. We came back and told Eri we got rid of the whole crate and she said to me, "Wait a minute, did you actually ENJOY it?"
I guess stuff went okay today otherwise. I even wore a suit jacket all day for the first time in ages. Classes weren't bad and EVERY single one of my Wednesday students showed up to class, which hadn't happened in ages. That was nice. I designed a scavenger hunt for Christmas candy for my 11-year-old student, with clues like "The pink bell is under the snowman", "The orange star is on the TV" and stuff. The best part is I did it like a linked list, where each location had an identifier card and a pointer paper (ie, an orange candy cane card and a "the yellow star is under the basket" pointer), so when I redo it for my adult classes next week, I can add in a whole lot of locations without too much difficulty. I KNEW that if I waited long enough my computer science background would manifest itself in my English teaching...
Oh, yeah, so when I went out to get my lunch/dinner I went to Tenya under the tracks, and then stopped in Sports Authority, looking for a heating pad for my back, because I'm seriously getting worried about my constant back pain. I ended up having to talk to some salespeople a while about what I was looking for and so on and the only thing they could offer me was these hokkairo thingies, the Japanese small heating pads that you usually put in your pockets on a cold day. I've got one up against my back right now and yeah, it doesn't seem particularly effective. I might have to try Ito Yokado or somewhere else to find an electric heating pad, maybe. Bleh.
I stayed at work tonight until midnight. No joke. I was just photocopying stuff for my Thursday classes from around 10:20pm onward. The thing is, I kept thinking to myself, "Well, I could either be doing this NOW, or I could be doing it tomorrow and being all stressed out." Thursday is usually my most difficult day, so hopefully this will at least make it a little bit better. (I still have to prepare things for two classes but that's better than having to prepare for six.) The scariest part was when I heard the doors open around 11:15pm and I was just like "OMGWTF" but it turned out to just be Duane coming back to pick up some papers. He was as shocked to see me as I was to see him, so I guess it all worked out.
Well, actually to be honest I really wasn't looking forward to it at first. Today was a really cold day, and I was feeling really tired and zombie-like when I got to work, etc, and Eri was all like "Today we're doing tissues! YAY!" and I'm like "Oh geez yay whatever." But, the way the timing worked out it made the most sense for me and Duane to go out there around 3pm (Eri had a class then) and hand out tissues, so we did that. Duane told me it was going to be a bit of a humiliating experience, but we really need new students at our school, so it'd be good for us.
We got out there and put down our crate of tissues. I forget how many packets we had but Duane said, "We'll just do this for half an hour and see how many we can give away, and do the rest on Friday."
Now, personally, I know that I ignore 90% of the people giving out tissues/flyers in stations, and usually they ignore me too, so it's all good. I kind of expected a lot of people to ignore us too, and plenty of people did. BUT, there's got to be something strange about seeing a tall American white girl in a suit with a Canadian black guy both standing there with big silly grins on their face saying cheerfully, "Eikaiwa no GEOS desu! Eikaiwa no GEOS desu! Onegaishimasu! Onegaishimasu!" ("We're from GEOS English School! Please take this!") So I usually tried to catch people's eyes and THEN say it and hand them tissues.
Lots of people looked at us funny but most of them actually took the tissues. Some of them asked us questions. One time a bunch of high school boys were walking by. I gave them tissue packets and they started giggling at me, in that "Whoa the gaijin speaks Japanese" sort of way, so I laughed too and said in Japanese, "You should study English! Come to GEOS!" They laughed even more and ran off. It was funny.
Duane says I'm a natural. We got rid of the entire crate in 20 minutes.
I think we managed to pick a pretty busy time, and we spaced ourselves well so that I was getting people coming out of the station and he was getting people coming in. And I do have to admit that if we'd been out there much longer I would have probably started to die of either embarrassment or FREEZING COLD. But it wasn't so bad for just a little while. We came back and told Eri we got rid of the whole crate and she said to me, "Wait a minute, did you actually ENJOY it?"
I guess stuff went okay today otherwise. I even wore a suit jacket all day for the first time in ages. Classes weren't bad and EVERY single one of my Wednesday students showed up to class, which hadn't happened in ages. That was nice. I designed a scavenger hunt for Christmas candy for my 11-year-old student, with clues like "The pink bell is under the snowman", "The orange star is on the TV" and stuff. The best part is I did it like a linked list, where each location had an identifier card and a pointer paper (ie, an orange candy cane card and a "the yellow star is under the basket" pointer), so when I redo it for my adult classes next week, I can add in a whole lot of locations without too much difficulty. I KNEW that if I waited long enough my computer science background would manifest itself in my English teaching...
Oh, yeah, so when I went out to get my lunch/dinner I went to Tenya under the tracks, and then stopped in Sports Authority, looking for a heating pad for my back, because I'm seriously getting worried about my constant back pain. I ended up having to talk to some salespeople a while about what I was looking for and so on and the only thing they could offer me was these hokkairo thingies, the Japanese small heating pads that you usually put in your pockets on a cold day. I've got one up against my back right now and yeah, it doesn't seem particularly effective. I might have to try Ito Yokado or somewhere else to find an electric heating pad, maybe. Bleh.
I stayed at work tonight until midnight. No joke. I was just photocopying stuff for my Thursday classes from around 10:20pm onward. The thing is, I kept thinking to myself, "Well, I could either be doing this NOW, or I could be doing it tomorrow and being all stressed out." Thursday is usually my most difficult day, so hopefully this will at least make it a little bit better. (I still have to prepare things for two classes but that's better than having to prepare for six.) The scariest part was when I heard the doors open around 11:15pm and I was just like "OMGWTF" but it turned out to just be Duane coming back to pick up some papers. He was as shocked to see me as I was to see him, so I guess it all worked out.
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The other day a Japanese guy came in who had just been studying in Australia for like 5 years... he was tall and good-looking and had the BEST Australian accent. He didn't seem all that interested in studying at GEOS after we talked to him, though, which made me sad, and also oddly made me think of you for some reason.