Hey all!
So this past Saturday (12-7-13) I attended my scheduled Interac Seminar!!! Yaaaaay! It was super fun actually and here’s the day play-by-play: 
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 what’s going to happen, will happen, so 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! LOL
Anyway when I walked in with another Interac I met in the parking lot (the only other girl there I should add!) there were 2 Interac’s waiting in the lobby and we made 4. It stayed this way for quite some time but eventually (with a few late arrivals later) there would be 8 of us awesome interviewees! (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 being curious! :p)
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 started with the info part of the seminar and that took about 2 hours. Mostly 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 stuff and there was some new information. Take notes throughout this part so you can remember the important info, the interesting random info, and 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 students that will turn on the English part of their brain and get them excited-1.5min, and finally (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! Stay cool. :)
Also see Part 3 (Interview) here!
Check out my YouTube videos about the seminar here!