First of all, I must apologize for a total lack of posts recently, I will try and get back into it from now on... The information must be spread and all that good stuff... Reader numbers have dwindled a little, but I guess that's what happens when you don't post so often...
The kind of classroom that will soon disappear...My branch is one of the refreshed units, with a move about 7 minutes walk from the nearest station. Admittedly the old one was about 3 minutes from the station, but it was in the heart of the area's most important shopping district... The new one is on a side street in the middle of nowhere... The old one had a sign visible from about 5 miles away on top of the building... The new one you need to be within about 30 feet to be sure the sign has those 4 giant golden letters on the sign...
Once inside the branch (or campus as GComm likes to call them), things seem slightly different... It looks clean but it is obviously cheaply constructed. The tables, not classrooms, have a partition which goes just over the level of the seated students and instructor's heads. This provides no sound protection from loud instructors, students and 5 student classes. Yes, as expected the new schools are designed to accomodate 5 students. The partitioned areas are bigger than the previous booths, and in our current branch we have 5 as opposed to 10 in the old school. Oh, but one of the partitioned areas is being used for storage as we have no space in our shoebox of a teacher's room.
The teacher's room/store room/staff put all your shit in here room/photocopier room is tiny. It doesn't have anywhere near as much room as it needs. There is barely enough room for someone to walk past behind someone sitting at the table writing a comment, and I have heard at one branch that there isn't enough room to get a table in the room. Now my handle is Big Man in Japan for a reason, I am not a small fellow, I am lucky that some of my coworkers are smaller than me, and this makes things bearable...
Finally, the
pièce de résistance (I know the accents make me look like a dick, but they make me laugh) is the Voice/KIDS room... GComm have constantly demonstrated a lack of interest in the KIDS program, i.e. ditching Chibikko KIDS Club, getting rid of all the people that prepare the materials and support instructors, throwing away the already completed 2008 materials so we can rehash the shit from 2005 etc... Now they have given us a multipurpose room for KIDS and Voice. The room is almost filled with a hideous, fluorescent, nauseating, egg-shaped yellow table. I know you are only supposed to use 2 or 3 adjectives in a sentence, but this thing is a travesty. It fills the whole room so that KIDS need to be seated around the table during lessons... Four walls is going to suck... But at least it's the old materials, if you remember they involve about 20 minutes of workbook time, so it'll be OK...
Is anyone else in one of these remodelled schools, anyone else loving the new setup? Let us know what you think...
They have done it again... The geniuses at head office have come up with another brilliant idea... Students can now book their own lessons on the Internet from the comfort of their own homes... They can do it on the same day as the lesson too...
