I'm starting to get jazzed up about the idea of teaching Japanese here in NH, even though it's almost 4 months until I actually start. I even ordered a used copy of Genki from Amazon to see if it's a textboook I'd like to use. I've read good reviews about it and I probably could have waited a bit and found some way to get the university to buy it for me, but my impatience was worth the $16 it cost me to just order the copy myself. I have no idea what the students' levels are going to be. I could continue using their current text because they've only finished about half of it, but I don't like the fact that they have a textbook that is all in Japanese and then a supplementary text that gives them all the English translations of the textbook. Making students buy a new textbook when the old one is only half finished is not something I consider lightly, but I also don't want to lock myself into using a textbook I don't like just for the sake of frugality. We're looking at 50 hours of classtime per semester, plus at least that much time again for study outside of class. If I were a student I'd rather spend an extra $20 to get a text I like to work with.
I have heard from the university that 9 students have already registered for the class. Nine students, four classes per week, 50 minutes per class. Man, it looks like I will actually be able to teach, which is something I never really felt like I was doing the way I wanted to in Japan. How much teaching really takes place when you have 35 students per class and 10 different classes that only meet once a week? I never even learned half the students' names.
It was so long ago that I don't even really remember when the conversation took place. It might have been over beers at Manoa Gardens at UH or even after that, after we had all moved back to Japan, but I do recall sitting around with the boys (this includes Dianne, who like myself tends to be guy-like in her thought processes) discussing the ideal teaching position, kind of like the way Genji and his buddies sit around discussing the perfect woman somewhere at the beginning of the The Tale of Genji. I believe we came to the conclusion that the ideal job teaching Japanese would be at a small university where you work alone and create the Japanese language program by yourself. That way you can (hopefully) avoid a great deal of the politics that are always involved when academic types work together. UNH is not a small university, but the Japanese program couldn't be much smaller without being nonexistent, so I've landed pretty close to the bull's eye.