New Decade, new jobs, new blog features!

Now that we’ve entered a new decade, my Kyoto life has taken on a new dimension and I have gotten busy! You may have noticed I took awhile to post my New Year blog and for that I apologize! I guess was taking a little break, but also life has gotten a lot more hectic for me.

Jan 5th marked the completion of my grad school applications. I have applied for a doctoral program in environmental education related stuff, so a sizeable bit of my time since November has been spent searching for potential advisors and applying to programs. In the end, I applied to three schools, so we’ll see how that goes…Many thanks to my California mom, Renee, for mailing and e-copying transcripts, and to my recommenders who kindly agreed to add one more school at the very last minute. As part of some Karmic circle, immediately after all my grad school stuff was finished, I received an email from a former student asking if I’d write a letter of recommendation for her. How fitting.

What else am I doing with myself? I am babysitting for two American families who coincidentally each have 18 month old little girls. Starting this month, I will be babysitting four mornings a week, so no more sleeping in for me! From one of these girls, Claudia, I am learning “Claudia-speak” which involves a mix of Japanese and English words. (Her parents are both American, but her mom is doing doctoral research in Buddhist studies and speaks Japanese.) Not surprisingly, I learned that “unchi” means number two (as in feces) in Japanese from Claudia early on! ;) The other little girl, Sophie, is quite adept at sign language, and from her I am learning all sorts of animal signs, “more”, “milk”, etc. Going from teaching 18 year olds to 18 month olds is quite an adjustment, but I am enjoying it. They learn so much at this age and, unlike my 18 year old students who were not always thrilled about learning, Claudia and Sophie seem to learn something new every day. They are both really cute!

I currently have four Japanese English language students whom I meet with once per week for private lessons. These students are testing my breadth of skill as a tutor since they are all so different: one is a darling 8 year old girl who is a beginner in English, another is a housewife (whom I think is a beginner, too—I meet her tomorrow), another is a male researcher whom I help by editing grammar in his science writing, and the last is a guy about my age who is an intermediate learner, working on his conversational skills. It took awhile for me to acquire students, but now that my schedule is filling up I seem to receive more and more emails from prospective students. How do I find these students? They actually find me through a flyer I posted on a board in an International Center where native language teachers advertise. Most of my students are fairly close by, though I travel over an hour by train to a nearby prefecture to meet with the little girl. (Fortunately, her family pays more than I ask local students, so it makes the long travel time less painful.) I also still have Japanese class on Wednesdays, but that will soon be over, thankfully, since my schedule is really filling up. Oh, and I have joined not one but two Japanese community orchestras…but I’ll save details about that for another post!

I was requested a long time ago to post pictures to my blog and, due to some technical difficulties, I wasn’t able to make that happen. However, we now have a better internet connection, a new camera on its way (thank you, Renee, and Amazon customer service), and a microSD card for transferring our pictures off our Japanese ketai (cell phones). So…expect to see more!!

I love to hear your comments, so please do speak up! If you have any specific questions, go ahead and post them and I’ll do my best to answer. Here’s to a new decade!