{"id":141,"date":"2008-09-09T21:12:55","date_gmt":"2008-09-09T12:12:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.seanmisen.com\/?p=141&language=en"},"modified":"2008-09-09T21:12:55","modified_gmt":"2008-09-09T12:12:55","slug":"new-same-job-new-same-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/elementary\/new-same-job-new-same-life\/","title":{"rendered":"New Same Job; New Same Life?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been here in Saroma almost a week now.\u00a0 I am an Assistant English Teacher for the Saroma Town Board of Education as part of the Sister City relationship with my hometown of Palmer, Alaska.\u00a0 It’s a pretty sweet deal, and everything is going well enough, but I somehow haven’t found the right adjustment knobs and levers for my brain and emotions, respectively.\u00a0 The schedule is a lot harder to get used to than I feel it should be.\u00a0 I have to relearn everything about the house and town.\u00a0 It’s almost as if I still haven’t allowed myself to mentally reenter this life place.\u00a0 I really cranked down my Japan thoughts while in America.\u00a0 Like shut it off.\u00a0 I think maybe cultural transition is like a coal-fired power plant: it takes a lot of time to start up and is really hard to make similes with.<\/p>\n

I have a nice house though.\u00a0 I’ve been spending a lot of time sleeping in it.<\/p>\n

\"saromafront\"<\/p>\n

It has a back half too.<\/p>\n

\"saromaback.jpg\"<\/p>\n

And a nice shed and flower garden that I am trying to not kill.<\/p>\n

\"flowrers\"<\/p>\n

It’s a good deal, and so far my students are really, really great.\u00a0 Although I was mistakenly, sadly, inexcusably late to my 1st grade class at Wakasa Elementary this afternoon, the students floored me with their ability to listen and as a group come to understand the English that I was speaking.\u00a0 It was nothing short of amazing.\u00a0 And although at the preschool this morning, I taught with a young woman who I apparently drunkenly danced with, got the phone number of, and then called 7 times in the middle of the night, yet remember nothing of, the 4-year old students there learned, tabula rasa, <\/em> self-introductions and colors pretty well in just 40 minutes.\u00a0 And, although I have no real experience creating a curriculum or teaching my own class, the conversation class with the six students going to Palmer next month has really gone well, with the students actually creating own expressions of meaning off the top of their little heads.\u00a0 If any excuses are necessary for my lack of smooth integration, well, I think I might still be jet lagged.\u00a0 It’s 9pm and I am off to bed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been here in Saroma almost a week now.\u00a0 I am an Assistant English Teacher for the Saroma Town Board of Education as part of the Sister City relationship with my hometown of Palmer, Alaska.\u00a0 It’s a pretty sweet deal, and everything is going well enough, but I somehow haven’t found the right adjustment knobs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,15,18,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elementary","category-japan","category-middle-school","category-saroma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}