GIGAZINE cooperates with high school self-study, high school girls come to the editorial department

On a summer day in July, a student from Hyogo Prefectural Itami Kita High School contacted us and we decided to cooperate with them for about three days in their independent learning experience.

For more information about the high school girl coming to the editorial department, please see below.

Students think about the job they would like to do in the future, or the job they are interested in, and then do a work experience for about three days. Hyogo Prefecture holds a 'Try-it Week' for second-year junior high school students, but at our school, all work experience is handled by the students themselves, including requesting work experience from businesses and arranging the timing. Not only the work experience itself, but the process leading up to it is also part of the learning activities.

Before making an appointment with a business, we invite an outside lecturer to hold an etiquette seminar where participants learn how to make phone calls and the proper etiquette at the receiving location.

At the end of the summer vacation, each student will summarize their experience in a speech and present it to their classmates. The presentations in the 'Independent Experiential Learning' program are a step further than the 'two-minute speech,' and are given in a Show & Tell format, where students show things they created during the experience and photos they took during the experience.

Students selected as class representatives will be given the opportunity to give a presentation at the general presentation.

The program will generally run for three days between August 1st and August 31st. The dates will be decided in consultation with the students, and the content of the experience will be 'to acquire basic manners, specialized knowledge and skills through workplace experience, as well as to experience the rigors and joys of working.'

Basically, it's work in a safe place that doesn't involve danger during the day, so I don't think there's any risk of death if you're working at the editorial department of GIGAZINE... I asked, 'Is it really okay to work at GIGAZINE?' and it seems fine. Hmm.

So, the high school girl arrived. Here she is searching for directions to the location we were going to.

When I asked him, he said that even though he is a first-year high school student, he does not own a cell phone.

However, his typing technique seems very familiar, and in fact, he is very fast.

Apparently, 'I don't use a cell phone, but I use the internet a lot on my computer.' It feels like we're entering a new era.

When I asked him about it in more detail, he said that he has been reading GIGAZINE since he was in the third year of junior high school. That's quite a heavy reader.

This is a glimpse of the work on another day. As you can see, he was very busy filling out shipping slips.

Many of the gifts sent out for this giveaway were painstakingly handwritten by high school girls, so in a way, recipients are lucky.

Then, a few days later, I received a thank-you letter, or rather a letter in which they wrote about their experience working in the editorial department, and one sentence in it made a big impression on me.

I was also very surprised because it was the first time I had heard an adult so confidently say that working is 'interesting.'

Certainly, how you experience the world and learn how to see it in the beginning is a fairly big factor. If you think about it, places like the GIGAZINE editorial department, which was somehow chosen as a place for self-directed learning, you're sure to make many new discoveries.