Transfers

As I mentioned yesterday, today was the day all high school teachers in Nagasaki found out if they were being transferred. I made a beeline to Tsushima High from Toyotama. I had heard that as many as four of the English teachers might leave, and that, due to increasingly fewer students enrolling at Tsushima High, we might only get three new ones. Knowing that Kanemoto--a first-year teacher--and Takahira--a second-year--wouldn't be transferred, that left all but one of the remaining teachers as potential transfers. With so much of my love for the job coming from my relationships with the teachers, I was more than a little nervous.

I walked into the staffroom to find everyone talking quietly with one another. This in and of itself was in stark contrast to the usual sound of fifty teachers shuffling papers and coming and going from their desks. Masuda-sensei showed me where the list of names and destinations had been posted.

The results were what the English teachers had expected. Kurokawa, Satomi, and Kamito were being transferred. Also being transferred were Imamura, who was one of the office workers, and Kitamura, the vice principal. Most of the women teachers were talking with Satomi and Kamito, wishing them luck and expressing how sad they'd be without them around. I talked to both of them, then with Kurokawa. I could tell he was relieved to finally know that he was going and where he was going, but I could also see how sad it made him to be leaving.

Toyotama High didn't lose any teachers to actual transfers. Sunada, the English teacher who had replaced Urata, wasn't a full teacher in the first place: he hadn't received his teaching certification, and had been given the job as a temporary placement. Kokubu-sensei, having turned 60 this year, was retiring. The home ec teacher was taking maternity leave, and so there would be a temporary replacement for her.