What’s your name, when and where was your placement, and where are you from originally?
My name is Bruce Baird. I was just about to graduate from college (Columbia University) and I was looking to get back to Japan because I wanted to practice and improve my Japanese for a year before I went to grad school in Japanese studies. I don’t recall how exactly I became aware of the JET program, but JET was known as an option for going back to Japan. Of course, I was aware that I would be teaching English to students, but I tried to think of the most inaka place i could think of, where most of the people wouIdn’t speak English, so I would have a lot of chances to practice my Japanese. I had been in Japan previously and had been to Kochi once, and really liked the dialect there. So, I applied to go to Kochi, but was placed in the Ehime Education Research Center located on the southern side of Matsuyama city. The Educational Research Center was a place where school teachers could take a six month sabbatical to do further research on teaching techniques and part of my job was to assist with whatever research the English teachers were conducting. I wasn’t associated with a specific school, but I did have an assignment to go out to about seven schools mostly in the hill towns south of Matsuyama. Then one of the ALTs in Matsuyama got homesick (and quite frankly was having a huge case of cultural shock) and went home early, so I got an assignment to also go to all the high schools in Matsuyama.
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