JET Summer Conference

JET Summer Conference today! Woke up early still at 7:15am, cereal for breakfast, then I drove to a nearby ALT’s house to meet up to carpool to Maebashi (県庁). Even though the conference required us to get there at 9:00am, we set off super early at 8:00am and got there at 8:30am because parking supposedly takes a while. Once we got there we saw why – the県庁 has the fancy as parking system where you drop off your car and the machine system will whizz it away for you! Still, it didn’t take as long as the conference organisers made it out to be, but it was still nice to arrive early, leaving us time to get coffee (and ice cream for me haha). The conference started with the PAs welcoming everyone. It was nice to see all the ALTs gathered in one place after a while. The last big conference we had with everyone together was in November last year! Then a guest speaker gave a keynote speech, and it was actually really interesting and helpful. He used to be an ALT in Gunma, and now works in a design/media company in Tokyo. His presentation was about how he got from being on JET to a job in Tokyo. He recommended some Japanese websites that are good for people job-hunting (mynavi, wantedly), talked about how the skills he acquired from being on JET are actually really valuable and applicable in the real world, and gave other tips like networking, putting yourself out there, etc. If you can speak Japanese and really work at networking, it sounds like there’s a lot of jobs available out there after you finish on JET!

After that it was the workshops. We all went to different ones according to our preferences, which we had submitted to the organisers beforehand. My first one was the Games Fair workshop, where all the ALTs just exchanged lesson game ideas. Got some good ones out of that, so I’d say it was pretty useful workshop. Then we had our lunch break, and most of us went down to the cafeteria in the basement floor. I had my favourite cold udon again. After lunch it was the second workshop, and I selected the “getting more involved in the community” one, because the other options weren’t applicable to me really (living in the countryside, or the more high school specific one on helping speech contestants prep for their competitions). This second workshop was average, mainly because I already knew all the stuff they were talking about. The afternoon was then filled with discussion sessions in our respective school levels, and this was actually pretty helpful/interesting too. The first section, we were put into groups and had to share our lesson plan. My group were all Takasaki JETs though, and because Takasaki has a lesson plan book for us to follow, instead of sharing our own individual lesson plans, we each just talked about the changes we made to the Takasaki plan. Basically it was a games exchange workshop round 2. Still got some good discussion and games out of it though. The second section, we were put into different groups, and given discussion questions. These were taken from the submissions of different JETs when we had to submit our workshop preference forms. There were some interesting discussion points in there (working with your homeroom teachers, classroom management, using the new textbook materials, etc.) and everyone was pretty proactive with sharing, so it was good. I felt like this conference was more helpful/interesting than the one in November, cause I honestly can’t remember much from that one, except that the guest speaker was funny.

That was all the workshops and discussions for the day, so we filled out and handed in our feedback surveys, and then went back to the main room for some closing remarks, they told us who the new PAs were, and then we took a massive group photo. Everyone took a while to leave as we were all trying to catch up with different people, but eventually we left and a group of us went to Uobei for some sushi train. After that we went and hung out at an ALT friend’s place.