Well, the JET interview seemed to go pretty well. I was rather nervous beforehand, but everything seemed to fall into place as soon as I walked into the interview room.

As it turned out, there were three interviewers. One was a professor at the U of A whom I’ve met before, one was an ASU professor, and the last was a former JET participant. The fact that I knew one of them in advance was a big break.

They seemed pretty impressed with my previous language experience, and they even talked about sending me back to Sendai, which would be wonderful. They asked questions like, “If a teacher came up to you and wanted you to explain Halloween, how would you do it?” Of course this conjured up images of Harajuku. I nearly burst out laughing on the spot.

One of the things I asked them was if there were any online resources or a place where JET participants could collaborate on projects, or get ideas for teaching. While they didn’t seem surprised that I asked, they didn’t seem to have a solid answer for me. I’m sure that if someone (read ME) came along and developed a useful JET teaching community site, it would get plenty of traffic. I’m thinking guest articles, diagrams, props, lesson plans, “how to deal with X situation”; it would be a sort of self-moderating whoever wants to contribute deal. With a useful, professional-looking front page. Like a blog, but more focused, and probably more restrained.

There are some words in the English language that are beautiful, unique, and have their own distinct connotation. There are others at which the mind recoils, that illustrate verbal diarrhea in all its splendor, that deserve to be purged from the language altogether. Most of them are either mathematics or business related jabbermatter. If one of these words escapes your mouth I reserve the right to staunch the impending flow by punching you in the face.

Examples:
lemma
corollary
synergy
orthagonality
actionable
“turnkey solutions”