shirenomad | Stuffing the complaint box

Due to the snowfall, Torii-sensei wasn't able to make it to campus yesterday, so we bumped his final to Wednesday and moved up the program review. That's when the students get to make comments on the courses, teachers, tutors, etc. Plenty on all subjects, most of which I won't go into here, but we came to general consensus on the language courses (needs a more unified curriculum instead of multiple textbooks with little relation), breadth courses (some senseis just didn't get that they were talking over our heads, others were a lot better at checking to see if we understood), and tutors (less individual assignment to specific ones, and make sure there's a "Yoshi"-level super-tutor in the next team ;D ). Other subjects got more varied reactions, such as host families (depended on the specific family, some of whom seemed to treat their student as an English tutor and little more) and side events (Tae was really irritated with the temple trip, due to all the dirty looks one monk kept giving him for sitting out on the services). Overall, almost all of us agreed the curriculum still needed some heavy improvement but that the program was worth it just for the experience of coming to Japan. (Mike commented that he's particularly glad he came but that that's due to "special circumstances." If you don't understand why his comment had us all cracking up, click here.)