The Weekend Review - Part II: Mon, Tues...

Monday & Tuesday Opinin Exchange

I didn't really have much to do on Monday, except attend meetings and take notes, but I was up early because one of the other presentation groups was working on their powerpoint and rehearsing for their meeting in my hotel room. Even though I was woken up pretty early, I would say I got lucky with the hotel this time (really liked the girls I was with and we have similar sleeping schedules). Monday night was an enkai (sort of like a work party) at an Indian restaurant near the office we were at. Dinner was good, but I opted not to go to thenijikai/nachschpiel/after-party because I wasn't feeling too well. It was a fun night, though, and I enjoyed talking to some of the Program Coordinators (foreigners that work as advisors at the government headquaters for the Council of Local Authorities and International Relations - ha - that's a mouthful!), especially because they had some really interesting stories. Meeting some of the guys from the Ministry of International Communication - the people that run the consulates and embassies abroad - was also cool, as they were a little more open and outgoing and had just come back from assignments in other places so were interested in hearing about what we were doing with internationalization in their country.

On Tuesday, I was up early to get breakfast and talk to the other person on my team about our topic, studying Japanese before coming to Japan. She had finished the Japanese powerpoint and was doing the presentation in Japanese, so all I really needed to do was read in English, field questions and answer follow-up things, so it was sort of a breeze (especially with our topic), so I would say things went well. I also presented my short notes on an alumni report from the day before, but I'm a pretty fast typer (can type faster than I talk) so it was easy taking notes off of a transcript (rather than reading notes that I had taken and are already summarized).

In retrospect...

I feel sort of lucky to be part of this process and think it's beneficial to learn about what I've spent the last two years of my life doing from a different angle. I spend a lot of time working on this volunteer organization (I know one woman on our council that puts in 45 hours a week... and it's volunteer!), but I get a lot of satisfaction out of it, too.

I think I've explained it a few times, but the process proceding these meetings (that sounds funny...) was also a good opportunity for me to learn about what people like me are doing around the country and it re-enforces that there are a lot of really amazing people who care out there, too, that are working to make this a better place for other.

The meetings with the government themselves actually started with months of preparations, with the ministries giving our organization a list of topics to look into (and then we come up with a few more topics), us conducting national surveys to get data on these topics and then - as a last step - preparing a report on the data (submitted beforehand) and presenting it in a presentation in Japanese (and a powerpoint in English). It might sound like a lot (OK, and could have been if you - say - had to translate a report), but it was over a couple of months, my topic was sort of easier because the girl I was working with worked on a similar report last year and thus did a lot of the work and I don't really think reading questions or taking notes is hard. So it was a lot of fun.

This post is monsterous at this point, so I won't go on too much longer, but this OE, the topics we presented were:

1. the Team-Teaching Report (do we use the Handbook the give us & does TT work?),

2. the JET Alumni Report (the ministries were SHOCKED that not all JETs have jobs when they leave),

3. a General Activities Report (update on what AJET - both national and local chapters - are doing and some activities that JETs do in the community),

4. the Handover Procedures Report (some JETs get tons of info & some get none - how can we help this... trust me... a lot of good came from this topic!!), and

5. Pre-Departure Japanese Study Materials Report (ie - the Japanese for JETs and Japanese CIRs books we got before departure... what are the books missing, do JETs use them & how can we improve them?).

Pretty cool :) I'm actually looking forward to starting it all over again in March.