Festival season

The Shane system of 'standby' reared its ugly head again this week. Not sure if I've explained this before but it will help me vent my spleen so here goes anyway - My contract has 13 extra days of work written into it, some are used in training and the others are to support the standby and cover systems. This is to cover days that teachers take as holidays, take off sick, or to cover days when teachers decide they've had enough and leave with little or no notice. If the head office know someone won't be able to teach then another teacher is informed in advance that they'll need to teach that day (cover). This doesn't solve the sick absences and runaways though, so each month a list of teachers and days is put on display in the schools, if you're on the list then on your specified day you have to phone at 10am and check if you're needed to cover a teachers shift for that day.

So you can't really plan anything for that day just in case you've got to work, you can't have a lie in, and you don't get paid any extra whether you're needed or not. Questions have been raised over the legality of having people on call by their employer and not being paid for the service but nothing has really been done about it. The worst case scenario is that a number of people are sick in a different area and you're sent there rather than within the normal district you teach in. This is what happened to me, I was sent to the middle of nowhere which took me just over an hour each way and consequently had to cancel a couple of plans I had for the day. GRRRRRRRR.

Anyway, that aside, the last month has been pretty good. I've been to a few festivals involving dancing (Koenji Awadori festival), fireworks (Seibu Yuenji hanabi festival), and religious shrines (Hatanodi Matsuri festival). I even took part in the Matsuri, helping to carry a Mikoshi. I've renewed my work visa and against the odds got a 3 year one (not as common as they used to be, most teachers just get 1 year) which means i don't have to pay again each year if i do stay that long, and can travel around and come back and get a job with no problems - just more flexibility all round. And I've changed my contract from five to four days a week, obviously less money but I think they've made a mistake and agreed to give me more than I should get, which is nice!

The website I use for my photos is closing, I've transfered them all to another site and updated the old posts, however I have a feeling its not working too well so I might have to switch to another site if you can't see them. Here's a short video!

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=0AaOHDls3cN2LjQ