Job Discussion Forums

[tom39]

Ahh, good ol� Daves ESL Caf�, I haven�t been on this website since I graduated college. I chickened out and never went to Japan.


If you�ve seen the movie Office Space, then you have seen my working environment. The only reason im there is the money is pretty good. Other than that it is numbing in every sense of the word.


I have been toying with the idea of going to Japan to teach ESL for years. I graduated college relatively late, 24, and in retrospect should have pulled the trigger and traveled to Japan then, but I didn�t. I�m 28 now, and ive been at this job for almost 3 years. I have bills, a girlfriend, the whole 9 yards.


I cant help thinking, especially lately, that if I don�t do do Japan, I will truly regret it later in life.


I have no misconceptions about Japan being a fantasy land or anything like that, but I have always somewhat been drawn to some of the cultural aspects of the county.


I would like to see a PRIDE FC event live in the Saitama Super Arena and see Sakuraba fight. I would like to see the ancient sport of Sumo. I would like to climb Mt. Fuji. I would like to ski the mountains of Hokkaido. I would like to see the famous cranes. I would like to eat lunch in a real noodle house. I would like to be in downtown Tokyo at 2am. I would like to do all these things and more.



My question for you is this. I don�t want to belittle or trivialize teaching ESL, and if you take offense to my following comment I apologize. But, would it be possible to get a job teaching ESL and do all these things in a 6 to 12 month period? Basically use it for working vacation.



Ideally I could get a job, and I would like to be able to go on mini excursions during my stay.


Or would it make more sense to teach for x amount of time then leave the job then travel freely.


Has anyone out there tried to execute a similar plan?


Any tips, advice, are welcome.


I need to pull the trigger

[JimDunlop2]

Umm... If you do all those things in a 12 month stay you won't be doing anything else. Eg. going out for supper, having a beer with anyone, seeing a movie, etc.. etc... All what you mentioned takes money... And a fair bit of it. Japan isn't considered one of the world's most expensive countries for nothing you know.

As far as a job goes, the only job that would ALLOW you to do any of the activities you described above would be a full-time one. No one showers you with yen here for working only a few hours a day/week. That means, whatever you do, you will be doing on weekends, evenings, the odd national holiday (maybe resulting in a long weekend) during Golden Week or Obon which may be 4-5 days off. But that may or may not be the case depending on where you work. Not all jobs give you time off, not all jobs let you take national holidays off.

I recommend you do a bit of reading in some of the old posts here. Start with the stickies and if you have specific questions pertaining to anything, do a "Search" for those keywords. If you can't find anyone who's asked and answered your questions, throw it up on the forum.

Best of luck.

JD

P.S. Tokyo at 2 a.m. on any night is boring as hell. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but pretty much all of Japan has lights out by 10pm. In Tokyo you can extend that by a couple hours in the bar/club/entertainment districts, but by 2a.m. you will be sorely disappointed. Everything is rollshuttered, looks abandoned, no people around, and the only thing to break the monotony are the stark, fluorescently-lit convenience stores, the odd bosuzoku driving by and that's about it.

Your other adventures sound a lot more promising.

[tom39]

Thanks Jim. Dead at 2am? well maybe thats a shocker.


Maybe the best thing would be to work for 6months (hard) then play for 6.

[Sheep-Goats]

So long as you don't expect the accord sometimes granted genuine eduators (no matter their subject) there's nothing wrong with treating EFL (or any job) as a paid one-year semi-vacation. So long as you put in enough work to give your students what they're paying for, then you're doing your job well enough.

The standards are different for people who claim to do this professionally -- but for many employers just having a hard-working and earnest person around, even if they flat out state they'll only be doing it for a year, is enough. Lots of schools like to ring the EDUCATION EDUCATION bell in order to get more work out of underqualified folks, or to justify the horrible wages they offer for trained hard-working people, but it's actually refreshingly rare that you meet someone who's ringing that bell without any sense of irony while doing so.

Because of the rather severly limited career prospects in this field, I actually feel it's best for people to do their first two years or so while thinking of it as temporary work. It does lower wages for qualified people, and it does allow schools to exploit students and teachers alike (simply by their slightly more permanent situation), but as the situation stands to day it's quite unfair to expect someone to come blowing the horn of total devotion to a shlock post that would often straddle the border of volunteerism back home.

Get a TEFL certificate, say goodbye to you girlfriend, and remember that when you come home your future employers won't think too highly of what will have been, for you, rather hard and demanding work where you learned a lot. You can give up a lot more than just your job by taking a one year vacation, is what I mean -- but if travel is worth it to you then it's certainly better to do it now than 10 years down then line when you'll have kids.

If your job really pays that well, why not just take a long you-pay-for-it vacation? Visit Cambodia, Thailand and India if you're a bit skint -- you'll get a much better idea of what living abroad is actually like -- very few of the pleasures (or troubles) involve the things pictured on the cover of your LP.

What I mean is that taking a year off out of you current field often spells a career change for people when they come back home. If that's what you want, then you'll be golden. If it's not, you have a much harder decision to make.

And trying to fanagle things with the girlfriend is really a lot harder than you could ever imagine...

[tom39]

I hear ya,


you make many valid points and gave some sound advice. I would love a career change so im not worried too much about the gap in my resume.



The girlfriend is actually pretty cool with it. She knows ive always wanted to do it and she supports it. Shes from Thailand so we've actually discussed spending time there as well. Maybe we could kill two birds with one stone.



The reason i cant just take a full year off is becasue of the cash issue. Im well aware of the cost of living in Japan, thats why working while i was there made sense to me. Even if i broke even after the year, i would be fine with that.

[Glenski]

If you get on the JET Programme, you'll have plenty of time for all of those things. It may depend on your location, though. Oh, and you just missed the deadline for applying for 2005-06 jobs, so you'll have to wait until Dec. 2005 to apply. Look at Earlham College and see what their program is like.

Otherwise, teaching at an eikaiwa usually means 5 days a week (not necessarily having 2 consecutive days off) from noonish to 9pm. Your vacation days are usually the same as everyone else in the country (Golden Week, Obon, and New Year), which is when travel and lodging rates go up.

You don't even have to come here and work if you only want to do the things you listed. Just check out the sumo tournament schedules in advance, and come as a tourist.

[stretch]

i'm with glenski on this one. i was a jet and had tonnes of vacation time. about 4 months or so when you add it all up. 2 months in summer, close to a month in the winter, a week here and there plus my 12 days of actual vacation time.
jet pays well so you can do whatever you want but you do have to commit to one year with them. if you run away after 6 months, you will leave your school without a teacher for 6 months making many students sad that and you will be considered a very evil person.
my vote goes for jet but like glenski said you'll have to wait a long time before you can apply.
btw i waited till i was 27 b4 i applied to jet.