Hey all!
So this past Saturday (Dec. 7, '13) I attended my scheduled Interac Seminar!!! Yaaaaay! It was super fun actually and here’s the day play-by-play:
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So I have been dreaming about this seminar and the dreaded demo lesson for weeks now. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong in all these dreams. So imagine my surprise when I sleep better than I ever have the night before this seminar! I guess I worried enough about it Wed-Fri and come Friday night I just decided that what’s going to happen, will happen, so I may as well get some sleep!
So waking up was challenging as it was cold. And rainy. And this is SoCal and we just don’t do that here… But I made it out the door by 7:30AM sharp and flew down the surprisingly traffic-less and construction-less 60 freeway to get to the hotel in L.A. by slightly after 8AM. As we weren’t meeting Richelle, our recruiter, in the lobby until 8:50 I practiced my demo for awhile and spied on a guy in a car diagonal to me that I could see was doing the same thing! Yes!
Anyway, when I walked in with another Interac interviewee I had met in the parking lot (the only other girl there I should add) there were 2 Interac’s already waiting in the lobby and so we made 4. It stayed this way for quite some time but eventually (with a few late arrivals) there would be 8 of us awesome hopefuls! (And one of them had taught with Interac for 3 years before so I felt kind of bad that we were all grilling him, but not quite bad enough to stop!)
Richelle took us up to the boardroom and she was awesome! She really wanted to help us all feel comfortable with each other and confident that this was the right decision for us in our lives right now. So she began with the information section of the seminar which took about 2 hours. For the most part it was stuff you can find on their website if you look hard enough, but it was still interesting to hear her experiences with this experience and there was a bit of new information. I advise taking notes throughout this part so you can remember the important info, the interesting random info, and also look like you are serious about wanting to understand all aspects of the job and living in Japan (which you should be anyway at this stage!)
Next came the 15 minute grammar test. Not too bad. There was a spelling section (what word is wrong in this sentence, one long run-on sentence you needed to punctuate, etc.) and an active or passive voice identification section… Who knows how that one went… Anyway, there were five sections total and overall I don’t think you need to stress too hard about it. If you speak English you should be able to figure most of it out, just don’t overthink it!
We had a break then and when we came back we had our… dun dun duuuunnn…. demo lessons! Apparently everyone wanted to go right away and before I knew it….I was last. Oops! I really need to work on speaking up sooner/louder. Work in progress. So the lesson is 6 minutes tops and 5 minutes minimum.
There are 4 sections:
(1) a short self introduction in English (and some Japanese helps)--60sec;
(2) reading a paragraph that they provide (don’t get fancy, just read it)--30sec;
(3) a warm-up lesson for 3rd year primary students that will turn on the English part of their brain and get them excited for the lesson to come--1.5min;
(4) a high school level lesson that is either about shopping, giving directions, or irregular verbs (brave souls!)--3min.
All right guys, this is getting long so visit Part 2 of this post to learn about the Video Demo and the in-person interview at the end!
Also see Part 3 (Interview) here!
Check out my YouTube videos about the seminar here!