Job Discussion Forums

[steki47]

[marley'sghost]

I just got my yearly schedule from the big "I". Aside from the points most amusingly and succinctly brought up by zues, the most disturbing change for me, is all the summer holiday "work days" are now labeled "Training" and "English Camp". The company also started sending some of us out to this English summer camp the local big BOE is running. They never bothered keeping track of us during school vacations before. Those school holiday "work days" were always just vacation. It will really suck if I have to start burning my holidays to get out of summer busywork. We'll see how it all works out, but I don't like what I'm seeing so far.

[Solar Strength]

[fluffyhamster]

@Steki47: The main issue for the BOEs, for which they seem willing to fritter away hundreds of thousands of yen per month PER AET, is the hiring (and of course the firing) process. But it would be very simple to approach one or two of their current dispatch AETs and offer them direct hire in exchange for them doing all the hiring chores (advertising, correspondence, interviews etc) in future. Because as you say, for what the dispatchers are paid extra (even with all the outbidding and undercutting), for which they say they offer training support etc but then just undermine and rip off, it isn't worth it. What might help is if the labor laws actually reflected a more reasonable reality rather than a perfect yet twisted liability-filled never-never land (i.e. I'd prefer to have adequate pay but no guarantee of contract renewal even after working for the same employer for n years, rather than inadequate pay and no security at all simply because the BOEs are running scared of laws that say I should become a permanent hire at some point if hired directly).

[steki47]

[steki47]

[steki47]

[fluffyhamster]

[rxk22]

[quote="fluffyhamster"]

[steki47]

[rxk22]

Sorry, I had to delete the other quotes and messed up.

I have to say that the system is designed to pander to the slower kids, which slows things down a great deal. While the JTs love to control things and jump at any chance to get in way.
I think that stems from wanting to run things, as they would often times after I had my turn, try and nullify anything and everything I did. Which was rather annoying.

Also, I am at a private school now, and the office staff does everything they can to make sure we don't feel like part of the FT staff. Just amazing how many slights they can throw out there per day.

[fluffyhamster]

Wet blankets, killjoys, lead ballooners etc I can deal with. What got me most about a number of JTEs was how few quality grammars and dictionaries they owned (it was always dusty old Japanese-authored works), their apparent lack of intuition or even research skills (they'd always opt for very contrived, inauthentic, or indeed plain wrong examples), and their resistance to quite simple and eminently acquirable facts ("We don't need to teach that, it makes things less straightforward than necessary, it isn't in the textbook or exam, etc etc etc"). In other words, their applied linguistics sucked big time. I'm now tempted to compile a list of all the poor examples I've witnessed lol.

[fluffyhamster]

[steki47]

[fluffyhamster]

Well, any of those e-dictionaries, provided they came out post-1995 (or in OUP's case, 2000, after their more clearly frequency- than historically-arranged OALD6) will have reasonably corpus-based E-E works in their suite of contents (though some seem to insist on buying models containing only J-produced works e.g. the Genius range). Whether or not the eikaiwa student can actually use and exploit their e-dictionary fully is another matter though. (I once had to show a student how to access "Every example in" searches on her model, so she could make a start at researching issues of collocation, and colligation [grammar collocations]). I guess JTEs read the manuals more carefully, but still might not make full use of theirs. I think it's a bit much to expect students to keep investing in even paper let alone e-dictionaries just to keep up with say technology vocab, but sure, if they didn't buy the fancy e stuff they'd have more money to get a veritable stack of paper ones lol.

Agree with your other points. What compounds things is when the term tests some JTEs write are so badly designed that they expose grammar gaps just waiting to be filled (which smart students as you say may fill), but the JTE then merely shrugs and begs off actually teaching anything and making the best of a bad situation. One such example here: http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?p=26310#26310

And this one was a classic:

JTE: Fluffyhamster-sensei, how do you answer this? 'Which dress do you like better?' In the class, I will show a red, and blue.

Me: Hmm...I like the red one better; I prefer the red one. Something like that.

JTE: 'I like THE red better'? Can I not use 'the'? I think it is too difficult for the students...I want to make it easier. How about, 'I like red better'?

Me: The question was more about dresses than just colours. Trust me, 'I like the red (one (better))' is more natural than simply 'I like red (*one better)' (though you could of course follow that up with 'so...the red one it is!' LOL), in this context.

JTE: But I want it to be easy! 'The' makes it difficult...

Me: (getting a tiny bit exasperated) Well, if you use 'the', you might actually end up teaching or showing the students something - I mean, the use of articles is something they'll need to get used to. Think of it as "input"...plus, you yourself used (had to use) 'a red' rather than just 'red' just now, right?