(S)SETY

Thursday was the first day of the SETY (Summer Semester for English Teachers in Yamanashi – yeah, we lost an “S” in there somehow) conference. It’s mainly for the JTEs (Japanese Teachers of English) but all the JETs have to show up for it. They split us into smaller groups (15 – 20) and we do little activities. Thursday was mainly icebreakers. We had to bring in an object that was “important to us”. Then, everyone received a random someone else’s object and had to try to guess who’s it was. I think its mainly to get the JTEs to speak English with native speakers.

After that, we broke up into even smaller groups (3 – 5) to make a skit/commercial using someone in the group’s “important item”. I was in a group with two other JTEs, so I pretty much had to take the lead (as they were shy Japanese women who’s English wasn’t exactly stellar). One of the women brought in Pokemon figurines (that her kids played with) and we made up a skit based on them (in the skit/commercial, the Pokemon were “Working Monsters” that you purchased based on your profession – a teacher would buy a teacher working monster – and when you activated it, it would turn into a you-lookalike and go to your job for you). It was a silly idea, but the skit turned out to be kind of funny. We had to perform it in front of our larger group (the 15 person one). Then we all voted on the one that would eventually be performed for everyone (almost 200 people). Of course, no group voted for their own, but somehow, almost everyone (except for those of us in my group) voted for us. Great… So, we performed our skit in front of the whole crowd. With a little bit of improvising, we won (by vote of applause – hardly an accurate statistical method). A pretty good first day… Oh, and I got paid that day. Almost $3,000 – and, other than winning the skit contest, I haven’t done a thing yet.