Internship week 1

 Hi everyone! 

It's been a while since I've posted a blog. From now on, the blogs about my internship will be weekly and when I visit things during the weekend/hollidays I'll post about it daily. 

This first week of my internship has honestly been so amazing! When I came in on monday everyone was just so extremely kind and open. I'm teaching in the 5th grade, the team I'm joining is a team of 3 teachers and 1 special care teacher. My mentor Joy is honestly a dream, she is so nice and has been showing me all around the neighbourhood. She also keeps bringing me new stuff and snacks to make sure I have everything I need. And she even payed my rent for me because I don't have a Japanese bank account. She is so much more then just my mentor and I'm sure I will have an amazing time with her😍She has a really spontaneous and open way of interacting with the kids and you can just feel that they feel so comfortable with her. 

The other 2 'classroom' teachers are called Jay and Cameron. They are both such good teachers as well, I love being around a team that is so good at communication and completing eachother in every way. The special care teacher is called Aris, we share a desk in the classroom and have honestly been talking non stop. He showed me the way to the cafeteria the first day where we have lunch togheter with many other teachers every day. 

There are 51 children in 5th grade, each classroom teacher has their own group but they do almost everything togheter. Most of them have opened up to me already, although I do notice that some of the Japanese kids might need some more time since I don't speak Japanese and their English is not fluent so they prefer to talk Japanese with eachother. 

This one boy, Youssef came to me on the first day and said 'teacher, did you have a good day? I hope you did because I really like having you here.' and it honestly made my day! Most of the kids are this nice and all of them are so polite! 

I haven't really been in front of the classroom to teach yet because they have a very unique system, the don't work with books or a method. They've created their own method of doing everything and it takes some time getting used to that. The teacher will usualy explain the assignment for about 5 minutes and after, the kids just start working on their laptops. They barely use paper anymore. Last weeks math was focussing on fractions and it was honestly focusing more on the terms used in fractions then the math itself. The kids had to make a slideshow of these terms and find the meaning of them online. Its a big difference from what I'm used to. 

Today (Friday) the kids only had half a day of school. In the afternoon the teachers had Earthquake Emergency training. It was really cool to see but so weird because I could never imagine this in Belgium. If a bad earthquake was to happen, the school is the evacuation center for the whole neigbourhood. So teachers have to be prepared to run this center. We learned how to built a toilet on the sewers and how to build a comfortable bed out of cardboard boxes. We also learned how to fill in the emergency forms. It was honestly really cool to see how prepared these people are, if there would be an earthquake in Torhout I don't think any of us would know what to do. Well...except me ofcourse, I would built the best cardboard bed in the neigbourhood after all that practice.😉

This evening I went out for sushi to celebrate a very nice first week of my internship and then just passed out in bed. I woke up this morning (Saturday) still in my clothes from yesterday. It had been a really fun week but also a really exhausting one 😅

Talk to you later!