Job Discussion Forums

[fluffyhamster]

In a recent job (which I had for only one school term), I was expected to write lesson plans, develop supplementary activity materials, and copy and distribute the lot to every teacher in the second and third grades at the private junior-senior high school at which I worked. These time-consuming duties (an average of at least around 3-4 hours every day, and often longer, after teaching all day) were not made clear in my contract (which was drawn up by a third party, a "middle-man" agency/company), and I was specifically told that I would only be responsible for planning my own lessons (for which, rough notes and a general idea of what I intended to do would've obviously been sufficient).

The other new teacher who began at the same time as I did was also quite surprised with these arrangements, and even the tenured senior teacher, who'd been there a long time and had had time to adapt to the system, acknowledged that it was not an ideal set-up, and that the school really needed to hire a few more foreign teachers to help the English conversation program run more smoothly.

I complained about the discrepancy between my contract and the actual working conditions to my company, but rather than forcing the school to e.g. make past curriculum materials freely and easily available to me (I could've told teachers to follow previous successful plans, for example), this action that I took seemed to set in motion a train of events that lead to a (major?) disagreement between my company and the school, the school terminating the contract, and me losing my job.

I was certainly not happy with the school management (a bunch of self-important, overbearing, haughty, uninspiring, barely competent slackers who seemed to hate their jobs), but what really irritated me was the conduct of my company; they obviously didn't want to lose the contract and began criticising my teaching with all manner of minor and quite nit-picking points about what I should be doing, and how I should improve this or that aspect of my teaching, all the while overlooking the glaring antipathy to the foreign teachers at the school by the majority of the Japanese staff and practically all the students other than those in or involved with the very first grade (this seems significant!). They offered me no apology for not getting the contractual details straight (I spent over 300,000 yen to move to be near the school), forced me to sign a form claiming I was taking "voluntary retirement", and patronized me with something along the lines of "sometimes the school doesn't suit the teacher". (In fairness, I should say that they renewed my visa and paid me a few extra weeks' wages, so I had almost two months' worth of severance pay, but nevertheless, the past eight months have not been easy, and I obviously have lost a lot of earnings; that being said, if the school had decided to retain me for longer, I am not sure I would have stayed beyond two terms, and certainly not a year, given the general disdain and contempt for the foreign teachers, hell all the teachers, there. That school seemed to think it was simply too good for anyone it deigned to employ to really be working there, and most of the teachers looked unhappy. Laughter was a rarity in the staffroom...in fact, I can't recall there being any animated discussions at all! Everyone was just hunkered down at or slumped at their desks...).

Anyway, I just wanted to know if there's anyone who has had similar experiences. Should a teacher just "suck it up" and endure situations like this?! As I said in the second of the Teacher forum thread links below, 'I've never heard of teachers having to write materials explicitly for others to use whilst teaching full-time, so I don't think I was too much of a whinger to object to it in principle...'.

http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/viewtopic.php?p=11966#11966
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/viewtopic.php?p=15281#15281

[guest of Japan]

It does indeed sound like it was a difficult situation. But, I do think you might have tried too hard. You approached the situation in a very Western say. That is that you tried your utmost to meet and exceed work expectations, but at the same time became vocal about your rights. The Japanese way would be to do what you can, appear to be doing your best, and most importantly not rock the boat. I've found that Westerners are often held to a higher standard of Japanese conduct in the workplace than the Japanese themselves.

[Mike L.]

Agree with guest of Japan.

Most JTE's (Japanese Teachers of English) assigned to work with in the past have been slackers!

You oculd have been the same but to your credit sounds like you gave it your all.

Also agree about the double standard thing.

The most important thing for a Japanese person to do a work, especially in teaching, is to be at their desk at the designated time.

The rest, teaching ability, classroom maangment etc is all irellevant!

For the gaijin anytime something goes wrong, usually, there's a sort of "blame the gaijin" reaction from manamgnet.

In your case it sounds like you rocked the boat too much. Next time remember to watch your Japanese slackers and copy them.

If you do happen to get paired up with decent Japanese teachers then by all means knock yourself out it will be appreciated!

BTW I'd say your former employer owes you about 2 weeks pay since they focred you to resign in a which away was tantamount to being fired which legally requires either 30 days notice or one month's pay...

[Mike L.]

post repeat

[fluffyhamster]

Thanks for the replies, guys!

Yes, I have learnt my lesson, and next time will keep my big mouth shut if it's Japanese middle men that I'm working for, bide my time until I myself am ready to and can afford to change jobs (my colleagues could seem to complain to their western bosses, without it getting all misconstrued...then again, they maybe didn't exactly intimate they were really p-ed off with their contracts and thinking of leaving, although I am sure that's how they also felt; certainly, nobody was saying 'Wow I love this job, and hope they ask me back next year!').

About meeting and exceeding work expectations, it really wasn't possible to ever become blase about the job, and if I'd not tried as hard as I did I would DEFINITELY have been in the same boat come the end of the first year (i.e. been let go, cast off)...but I appreciate I was maybe trying too hard in my first term there at least. Then again, maybe not...

Just to give you an example, the end-of-term aural tests for second and third grade took me about a week of full-time work to design, write, translate, check through, record, dub multiple tapes of, print and distribute (thankfully the teaching duties were trailing off around this time). If I say so myself, I did an excellent job, and there were no mistakes with score totals or spelling mistakes, no unclear instructions etc - nobody had to spend hours going through everything with a red pen and discussing substantial redesigns or overhauls (which me and the senior foreign teacher had had to do with a colleague's exams). I sealed the papers in their envelopes with some pride, and locked the tapes in my desk for safekeeping before going home (late) the night before the exam.

The next day, I was in the toilet having a slash a few minutes before the morning meeting was about to start when my mobile phone starting buzzing. It was the head of second grade (an English teacher) asking where the hell I was, and where were the tapes etc. I told her to look through the staffroom door's window, and she'd see me with a phone pressed to my ear walking towards her down the corridor. I went into the staffroom and towards my desk, unlocked it and brought out the tapes (Ta-DA!) as she launched into a spiel about how worried everybody had been about me (OK OK, so I was late a few times before from being so damn exhausted at getting home at 10:30 and working through until 3, 4, 5 am on some lesson plans on countless occassions. When was the last time any of the Japanese staff did that? Like the senior foreign teacher said, we foreign teachers were the hardest worked there) - like I wasn't going to show up on exam day, right, yeah, gotcha, as if that was going to happen! Then, she pointed out that the 'poor first year' Japanese teachers had made name cards to put onto the six tape players the second grade would be using, and that this was something that I absolutely should have done.

She was pretty much ranting by this stage and starting to create quite a scene (is it my problem if some Japanese are neurotic? If not psychotic?). I pointed out to her that I hadn't labelled any tape players as the tapes and indeed the machines were identical, and come the bell all the teachers would have had to do was come to me and collect a player. I had seen the third year mid-terms get all screwed up because people were chasing tapes, opening tape machines at desks scattered around the bigger staffroom to check tape labels etc, even though tape "3A" was no different from tape "3B", besides which, often the Japanese teacher's names were incorrect (as we'd discovered when helping out with distributing the mid-term papers), and I had had no way of checking those the previous night because I was, as usual, the last one to leave (I also didn't think I had the authority to alone be distributing things to teacher's desks, that was somebody else's job to start with).

She then roared 'But we have rules here!' (even though I was not aware of what those 'rules' might be because I did not have a rulesheet specifiying them all down to the last irrelevant detail). I simply said, 'Does the criticism here never end?' (I felt like saying, 'Who the **** do you think you're talking to here, your son, you stupid *****?!') and got on with loading the tape players with, as I again pointed out to her, identical tapes (I had checked there were six working tape players available the night before, and that seemed to be the most important thing).

I suppose that incident is the one that got me fired above all, but I really do think that was very unprofessional and uncalled for, even (especially?) in Japan. As I've said, I really got the idea many teachers there hated their jobs, found it stressful, and were ready to "snap" at any second, but it wasn't my fault that this mid-level teacher hadn't got a promotion (or a ****, the ugly ****) in years, and I am not the type who takes that sort of in-your-face BS lightly, especially when it comes on top of a bad contract. "Inspiring" the workers this kind of attitude from management is not.

This particular teacher had taken a dislike to me (actually, she didn't seem to like anyone) and rubbed me the wrong way up from day one by very pointedly and disdainfully asking - at the end of a second-grade homeroom teacher's meeting (the foreign teachers had to go along to these meetings for some inexplicable reason, as if we weren't busy enough) - 'Do you have anything to add?', even though I had sat there very attentively (I certainly didn't do my best to look too bored). I can only guess it was the aura of pleasantness, eagerness, a degree of undimmed passion for the job and a commitment to try my best (especially at that early stage) that she saw in me that she hated? (Or could it have been my rugged good looks?). Maybe she didn't mean it in the way that I interpreted it, but she seemed to have a knack for saying things in a certain way that I am sure even her Japanese colleagues would notice, resent and take offence at...

The senior foreign teacher had seen all of the above exam-day palaver, and promptly wrote up a list of rules (many of which were unnecessary, as I have said...whatever happened to laid-back staffrooms where things were entrusted to get done, and simply got done, without the need for pointless whip-cracking, underlining and point-scoring?), a bit late, but then, he was the only one who ever did anything like that to help us toe the line 100% instead of merely the 99% we had been - the cheek of that school, when they hadn't told our companies the half of the job description!

He was surprised and just couldn't understand why they were letting me go (I mean, it's not like I'd bitten anyone's head off or gone and formed a union or something, I'd discharged all my duties pretty satisfactorily, I thought, and he pretty much agreed), when I told him the "bad" news; he'd have to show the newbie all the ropes again, and it would take the newbie about a term to get settled in, get the students liking and trusting him or her etc. He said he would INSIST that he be present at the subsequent interviews to tell the teacher and companies exactly what the job was REALLY like (that is, entailed); he also said that if he didn't have a wife and kid to take care of, he'd be quite tempted to take a few months' severance pay and leave himself! That school doesn't deserve the hard-working teachers it "somehow" manages to "attract" and "keep".

Anyway, water under the bridge...

If I ever see anyone asking questions about working at that school, I will of course point out this thread to them. I'm prepared to give the company I worked for the benefit of the doubt; it seems they were misled and misinformed by the school during initial negotiations for the contract and at every subsequent stage. However, my own private opinion of that company remains that they are not competent (at least not when it comes to chasing and securing good contracts). By the way, that company literally begged me to take the job, saying the school would look very prestigious on their roster of clients - I wangled them getting a new, local apartment for me (paid them back the 300,000 yen though).

This was definitely not your average JET-type job, the land of laid-back lapping of milk and honey. I was on JET for 3 years and I was perfectly content to sit back and enjoy the ride, helping out only when called upon to and probably attaining more outside the classroom than in it (through e.g. doing sports, attending clubs, being around and available after school hours etc). The foreign staff at the above school simply could not afford to take hours in the afternoons and evenings off to play sports with the students (some of the Japanese teachers could) in the few sports clubs that the school had. Bun bu ryou dou (文武両道) ja nai ne! Mens insana in corpore corpulenti.

Hope you guys have all enjoyed reading my nice little "horror" story!

~- THE END -~

[guest of Japan]

Well, be thankful your experience is over.

For future note, don't ever be late, never make a Japanese teacher lose face in front of his/her peers, take great pains to communicate information like the location of tests, don't work until late at night unless it is absolutely necessary, don't constantly try to reinvent the wheel (your teaching partners are far happier if they can follow a textbook), and try not to overestimate your importance in a Japanese school.

As far at having 20 classes, making exams for two different grade levels, and designing a curriculum and lessons for classes you didn't even teach - It was way too much, and I don't know any teachers in Japan that would try to cover that much - despite their subjects requiring far less preparation time.

Lastly, don't be so sure your company lost the contract. You lost the job, but the company probably still has the contract.

[fluffyhamster]

Hi again GOJ!

Just to play devil's advocate here (because the discussion could get interesting), do you think a foreign teacher themselves should have to accept "losing face" like that, by being scolded unnecessarily by an overbearing superior? The woman lost face herself due to her overreaction, pure and simple, rather than from anything I did beforehand (you might say I hadn't done something right, but that's missing the point here, I think) or said in reply. I don't imagine the Japanese look favourably upon anyone suddenly chewing somebody out, even with their clearer societal pecking orders and "acceptance" of the "unavoidability" of bullying etc; that is, I don't expect a medal for standing up to her, but I doubt if anyone in that staffroom saw things quite her way, is all I'm saying.

Generally, it was the "high point", the culmination of months of unpleasantness from the whole of the second grade English teachers towards the foreign staff (the second grade Japanese English teachers were not held in high regard by any of the foreign teachers). It's easier said than done to not say anything at all, act poker-faced when somebody is screaming in yours, and I am not sure that it would have helped even if I'd said nothing: she was making it very clear that I had earned a big black mark in the school's book, and even marking all five hundred-odd exams myself and doing the statistical breakdowns and marking bands/cutoffs by hand (our part of the school didn't have a computer programme to do these things) and doing a good job of it obviously didn't erase that mark against my name, besides which, all this rather overlooks the fact that the exams themselves went off without a hitch despite her hysterics.

As I've also pointed out, it is hard to go home early when you have lesson plans to write for other people to use (without any thanks), stacks of copying to do before lessons begin etc. Even if I had knuckled down to it and worked non-stop preparing from 3:30 every day, I doubt if I would have left much before 7 or 8 pm. It was really hard to walk away and come back the next day always on time, refreshed, when I was having to worry about anyone's teaching other than my own, and the school made it quite clear that anything less than lesson plans formatted to their exacting standards and pages long, and professional-looking materials generally, just wouldn't do. You know, I bought a new PC right after starting that job, and just before I learnt I'd been fired, I'd also bought a snazzy new all-in-one scanner, photocopier and printer so I'd be able to leave earlier and do more of the prepping at home! (I wanted to be able to stride in in the mornings with a master sheet already printed and pasted up, ready to copy. The stupid ****s heading the central staffroom had actually made it almost impossible to upload documents into the PCs they had there, which made for dangerous delays in getting stuff ready and out on time).

Hmm I guess locking the tapes away in my desk was a bad move, but like I said, nobody was around when I left, and I hate to think what would've happened had the tapes gone missing in the night (that side of the school was always deserted, and the staffroom was never locked)...

But then, when you say 'For future note...' you are probably more highlighting things for the total newbies on the thread than for me in particular (I will still bear what you've said in mind, though!). Glad you sympathize about the sh*tload of duties...and like you say, just 'be thankful your experience is over'. In fact, if I could go back in time I wouldn't change anything, because I find every experience I have, good and bad, interesting, and there are some people and moments there that I am glad I encountered...my job at Interac before this awful one was, if anything, a bit boring...

I would be very surprised if the company retained the contract: the "sort" of teacher a company sends is a reflection of them and their selection procedures, and if my bosses irritated the school half as much as they irritated me I can't imagine the school would want anything more to do with them either. One thing's for sure, the school never seemed to want to stop and think, 'Is the way we run this place what's driving teachers away?', so it's likely that they would prefer to still just think "Bad" teacher = "Bad" recruiting company - nobody could ever reach or even aspire to the levels of excellence that this "school" somehow manages to achieve! (By that, I mean the brunt of the hard work is being borne by the teachers, and the university entrance successes are ultimately down to the intelligence and determination of the pupils. Why does the school believe that there is such as thing as "the school" involved in all this? Or expect people, particularly their teachers, to believe it? I for one don't, but I would obviously like it to be true e.g. it would be nice if they had whipped their curriculum into shape before inviting new teachers in to prop it up).

[guest of Japan]

I'll respond to this, then I really must go to bed.

[fluffyhamster]

All good points, GOJ, and thanks for replying again. I hope that anyone in our positions (thinking of accepting, or having just accepted jobs at "prestigious" private schools through dispatch companies) reads what we've both had to say here and treads carefully!

Hmm I think I'm pretty mature, but my "maturity" waxes and wanes according to the seriousness and respect with which I'm treated. Usually, I am quite the joker, and most people appreciate my humour and respond to it in kind, though I wouldn't blame them for thinking 'Jeez, does this guy ever get serious about anything?', for thinking I don't care and am not thinking about many things, under the surface...

I actually said 'I'm in the restroom. I'll be right there' just before I said that stuff about 'Hey, look out the staffroom door and you'll see me coming!'. The way she was talking, she must've thought I'd just gotten out of bed and had a twenty minute dash ahead of me to get ready and to the school. I was tempted to add 'Can you come and shake it for me?' after 'I'm in the restroom', but I somehow managed to restrain myself (by that I mean my mouth, not Mr Floppy, at hearing her sweet tones). Would you believe it, but I gave this woman my mint copy of Leonard Maltin's movie guide to keep the month before (she'd told me how much she liked movies, even though she didn't seem to like discussing specific ones with me). The ungrateful cow!

Yeah, I was making almost 300K (about 20K was regular attendance bonus, which I got for all but 1 of the 4 months. Any times I was late I actually took as hours from my official leave, once they'd pointed out the available procedures to me. I NEVER was late for an actual lesson, only those early morning periods that I knew I was "free" in, and only after I was pretty much fully prepped up - and exhausted from it all the night before - and therefore ready to rock and roll once I did arrive at the school). The times I didn't actually manage to get anything polished out on time could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and even the odd hand-written plan of mine had more in it than most of the plans that the other new foreign teacher "lovingly" crafted weeks in advance (it was easy for him to build up a collection of plans because he was only spending about five to ten minutes tops on each one, for just the maturer 4th graders rather than the brattish 2nd and 3rd, which pretty much left me with only my **** in my hand most of the time when I had to "teach" "my" 4th grade classes).

As for the worksheets, I was doing my utmost to make them cute and amusing for the students (especially the unmotivated boys). They weren't full of lashings of explicit grammar or anything too ambitious, anyway.

Wow, you reckon the company fired me and thereby appeased the School Gods, huh? Now I'm REALLY mad!!! (Actually, I couldn't give a t*ss if they have, because a dozen teams of wild horses could not drag me back there).

Time for bed for me too, I think!

[fluffyhamster]

[fluffyhamster]

[fluffyhamster]

Yeah, fired for doing a job that I was (more than) capable of doing, but to which I had not agreed. Kind of takes a lot of effort to get your head around, doesn't it? Certainly would've taken a lot to accept without complaint and swallow. I might have just about got on with it unstintingly had the Japanese teachers there (and the students!) been a lot friendlier...the second year head blowing up at me admittedly wasn't exactly connected to the contract issues, but it still smacks of the whole "take it or leave it" attitude that pervades that school...

I don't romanticize Japan, but I'd hoped there'd've been more "honour" (honouring of the contract) from them. It just doesn't wash with me, this "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" philosophy, that's just something you might clench between your teeth to stop yourself from crying out whilst getting well and truly sh*fted.

The fact is, the Japanese teachers at that school - of which there were 3 or 4 to a grade, making somewhere between a good dozen and 18 in total (some PT) for a subject like English, I didn't count them all or anything, but they were hardly understaffed when it came to Japanese nationals - weren't suddenly asked to start writing detailed curriculums in addition to their agreed teaching duties, and I imagine most if not all of them would actually object quite strongly to such a proposal, if one like it were ever to be foisted upon them overnight.

But like I say, it's water under the bridge, and I could make my life (and those on Dave's) a misery if I continued nursing a grudge against those a**holes.

OK, whinge over.

[fluffyhamster]

Actually, whinge isn't quite over yet...

I realized as I was walking back from the 24-hour supermarket just now, loaded down with beer, that I am often too nice and reasonable. The most recent instance of that was in this very thread, in fact!

I mean, I appreciate the replies and everything, guys, but a lot of what you said was kind of patronizing and platitudinous (did you even read all that stuff about 'Contract say me just teacher, actual work must write plans non-stop for other teachers'?), and you kind of used my plight to have a bit of a rant at your JTEs and the schools/English education here in general. (Prod prod, stir stir, wind wind, provoke provoke ). Like I said, I wasn't a newbie floundering in some oh-no-what-can-I-do, sh*t-I'm-in-JAPAN! kind of way, I was talking past tense, and even though you offered some sound general advice, a lot of that goes right out the window when specifics start entering the picture (1- crap, shaky, almost illegal/non-binding contract; 2- Neurotic tendencies and intransigency exhibited by management; 3- ...).

I was more hoping for a reply from somebody who'd been in more or less the exact same position. I don't want to hear from G****** ( ), recently sounding all lost and forlorn without a textbook, or slackers (not saying G is a slacker!!!) who can't be bothered planning even for their very own lessons - I want to hear from people who were suddenly told they were gonna also be full-time curriculum developers in their sleeping hours, after the teaching day was done, people who have worked at seriously understaffed schools where they had to plan for everybody else as well, simply because nobody would've had the time to themselves plan for four, five or six different grades, so thinly spread were the foreign teachers (none of them with at most just two grades to cover), and I certainly don't want to hear from people who just want to tell me 'Japan is like this, not like that', when I live here too (have done for nearly five years, so I too know all about the do's and dont's generally), and who don't seem to have the slightest clue about what it is exactly that I'm on about here (having not worked with such a "set-up"/situation themselves, or being unable to read.* ).

It would be great, for example, if I could hear from somebody who could tell me, 'Hey, I was in pretty much the same boat, and I took the mothers to court and won zillions of yen in compensation, and after the court case, the head of English at the school committed seppuku on the courthouse steps after apologizing profusely to me in broken English. Here's the number of my lawyer if you do decide to go ahead with this.'

Because I haven't received any replies so far from anyone who sounds like they had a job that was even half as gallingly bad, I can only continue assuming that my situation was, indeed, quite unique, and that that school really must be one of the worst places to work at in Japan - anything anyone might say about Japan and working in Japan in general just would not apply or hold in relation to working there, sorry!

Like I say, I was on JET (i.e. was retained on it) for 3 years so I'm not exactly the type who goes around making trouble and creating dissent when there really is no reason to. I know what Japan can be (and generally is) like, at least for single bachelors without too many worries (such as spouse, family to raise etc - long-term committments and reasons for possibly settling in Japan - see sobering posts by PAULH etc).

I read the debates on this forum about 'Why can't the Japanese change their educational system' with interest...my own theory is that given a JTE with good English (they do exist) and no objection in principle to developing the students' general English ability (thinking beyond university entrance exams - for which a better general ability, in addition to less inflexible rote memorization of set questions, could be more of a help than a hinderance, surely!) is "stuck" because they haven't REALLY taught a foreign language; certainly, they haven't taught Japanese to non-Japanese motivated learners who will have questions, expectations and demands, all bound to get the teacher thinking about what's essential to know, and how it can be best presented (just lecturing on the bare grammatical facts obviously won't always suffice). All they've really done is teach English as a very limited school subject, with the easy and very convenient option of falling back into Japanese whenever the going gets tough for all those involved, especially the teacher! (That being said, I'm not a fan of a strict implementation of the Direct Method, a ban on the L1 - native English teachers/NETs would certainly be of more use if they could speak the students' L1 at times, and there's really no excuse for an NET to not be able to speak it at all when they are living in a foreign country and therefore working in a monolingual learner setting i.e. with learners who all speak the same first language).

Somebody once opined that the money the Japanese government spends on the JET Programme would be better spent on providing funded training and exchange opportunities abroad for Japanese teachers (to help them improve their English and get exposure to potentially "new" ideas). I think a better idea might be to make them teach Japanese as a Foreign Language for a year or two (perhaps as part of their university studies, where they'd have access to international students); I'm sure such an experience would give them a lot to reflect upon, and a much better appreciation of how they might begin meeting their students at least halfway in the task of helping them learn a truly foreign language (that is, not one that is always "lost" in all-too-quickly-supplied, and often glib, translation).



*Then again, GOJ (you) did sympathetically write: 'As far at having 20 classes, making exams for two different grade levels, and designing a curriculum and lessons for classes you didn't even teach - It was way too much, and I don't know any teachers in Japan that would try to cover that much - despite their subjects requiring far less preparation time'...but he then offered all the other uncalled-for "tips"; I mean, if your contract is a load of BS, you're not going to be receptive to or take much of what they tell you after signing it very seriously, and the really irritating, ironic thing is that I tried to take the job seriously and do my best (without complaining directly to the school or making my displeasure obvious in any way) - I was quite the little samurai for quite a while there. Put simply, there just didn't seem to be any way to please those people, because they had absolutely no idea about what really needed doing to please everybody (including them).

[fluffyhamster]

Damn, sorry to have gone on at such length again. I'm obviously in the throes of working out what this episode of my life "means", and the conclusions I've reached are these:

-I was disrespected from the very first moment (vital information regarding duties was not disclosed in the interview, or at any subsequent stage to signing the contract, which also did not clearly specify what would be requuired of me). It really is not my imagination that the school had obtained its new teachers under false pretences, by not disclosing the half of the required duties. Even a capable professional (and I believe I usually am one) would baulk and object to suddenly having to assume many more extra duties than they had been anticipating, which would start encroaching upon essential rest and recuperation time (I was working 16, 17, 18 hour days to get stuff finished).

-My professionalism, integrity, ability and honour ("face", if you want) were called into question, impugned by the conduct of the second-year head especially (see above). There seemed to be an incredible reluctance among the management there that anybody who was trying to take the curriculum at all seriously could actually be very, very busy and suffer from exhaustion, or needing to prioritize one thing over another at times.*

So, I basically cannot accept that I could have done any more or less to please those people or avert the "problems" that arose. I am not in the business of teaching to be taken advantage of, and then to continue to be disregarded and disrespected when I try to meet whatever (unfair, unjust) challenge comes my way. The answer as I saw it would most certainly NOT have been to treat it all as some sort of joke (What - played on me? Ha ha! Very funny!), enter a state of denial; if anything, to do that would have just been to delay the inevitable for only another two terms (the school let almost every teacher it had go after a year, because it didn't think any of them were good enough; it didn't stop to think that maybe the teachers had objected to something and withdrawn whatever skills and energies they might have possessed). Obviously it was always going to be a very fine balancing act at that school, between thinking you were never doing enough and seeming to do "too much", because they never, ever actually said 'This is fine, more than enough, you are doing too much, relax'; any indication of grudging approval would have killed them, been more than they could have beared giving.

I wanted to improve the situation for myself and for future teachers there, and the tenured senior foreign teacher actually THANKED me for, as he put it, "lighting a fire under his a**". It seemed he felt he'd been puttering along for too long keeping his head down and pretending that he was "lucky" to have his job whilst being worked like a dog, often not having enough time to see his children in the evenings, and I honestly believe that he at least responded to somebody with a bit of vision and some balls coming in and saying 'This could be a really great place to work, with a good programme, if only we'd...yeah, why don't we do that? We'd save ourselves a lot of time, effort and grief in the long run if we did'. I seemed destined to become his 'right-hand man', his sounding board, until the Japanese bosses, perhaps woken from their afternoon nap by my company rep asking a few polite questions such as 'Excuse me, but do you have any past curriculum materials that you might make available to the new teachers?', responded with a move that was out of all proportion to what I was "doing".

-I therefore see it as that school's loss, not mine, that they didn't realize that they were always casting off good teachers along with the bad, starting afresh all the time, because it was basically too much bother for the Head of English (who wanted to leave everyday before 4pm I think, and often did) to even consider getting involved and DOING something, even delegating, in order to improve their non-existant curriculum.

The simplest thing, of course, would have been to just hire a few more teachers instead of continually firing the few they'd conned into coming to work themselves to death there, but of course they "didn't have" the budget to do that, the cheapskate exploitative ****s.

-Nobody tells me to do a good job, and then gets away with saying I am doing or should do a bad one when that is in fact just not what I do. This is rather like coming up to me, slapping me in the face and then not expecting me to say, 'OK, I'm not sure why you did that, but why don't you try that again, and I'll show you how to do a good job of whatever it is you were trying to achieve with that.' I was given planning responsibilities at that school, and although I didn't actually want them and would've preferred to concentrate on doing as good a job as I could of just doing my own thing teaching-wise, I took those planning responsibilities seriously and wanted to all I could to make my life at least become easier; not "rocking the boat" would've admittedly kept me in my job, but then, I'd really have to ask if anyone could continue for long in that kind of job, where compromizing, biting one's tongue and suffering from being saddled with duty upon duty whilst not having the power or authority to do anything to lighten the load and make things more efficient, unnecessarily reinventing the wheel every year, were all the "order" of the day/week/month/year.

*Quick bonus story: right when everyone was in the midst of marking their stacks of exams - I had over 500, remember? - the school allowed some old founding fart to come in and lecture us all for over two hours about 'the youth of today, ooh the lazy little punks!'. we were a captive, not captivated, audience. The head of English then had the cheek to come up to me and demand that, without any notice at all, I hand over all the fourth-grade vocabulary "quizzes", useless sheets the other new teacher had saddled everybody with, that I hadn't yet had time to mark. When I pointed out how busy I'd been during term time, and especially recently with the exams, she snorted I was simply "making excuses". When all the teaching and exams were finally over, and I thought I'd have over a week to clear the backlog of continually-assessed work - poster presentations, roleplay skits etc, practically a large suitcase full of sh*t that ended up making only 10% or something negligible of their total grade - the school suddenly announced it all had to be marked in two days. I am not exaggerating when I say that I sat there for 10 hours straight for each of those two days with a calculator, ended up with a splitting migraine to go home with both days. The school had conflicting criteria for assessing things (which lead to complaints from the students, relayed through to the JTEs to the AETs, resulting in long discussions in which nothing was changed because the AETs didn't ultimately have any authority to alter the criteria and marking sheets), something silly like six bands of excellence across for nine criteria down all supposed to be decided upon, added up and then divided by a factor of 3.5 to yeild a percentage to then be added to something else in the 10-15 seconds available at the time between each student's poster presentation (then think 20-25 students per class x20 classes x2 poster projects per term, and I think you can see how a backlog of calculations you couldn't WAIT to get stuck into would soon build up). Oh, I also had to type up new guidelines in English and Japanese for each poster thing, roleplay etc. Yup, that curriculum was a pain-in-the-*ss paper chase alright, plans, supplementary materials, vocab sheets then tests every unit, poster project instructions and assessment sheets, same for roleplays, exams, guidelines for the curriculum itself so all the students were clear, ****in' Amazons of paper. I must've run off thousands of copies per week, easy, for me and the all the other teachers needing my stuff.

[sethness]

Hamster-- posts're too long there, buddy. Each one's a Moby Dick novel.
Short & memorable works better for most readers.

About your experience: It's East meets West. Grammar/Jr. High / High School teachers in Japan used to have one solid union, which recently broke into two, and lost much of its bargaining power. Since then, it's been quite easy for management to push teachers around like most Japanese companies abuse salarymen. This includes super-vague job descriptions, "volunteered" overtime, and so on.

We Westerners don't really understand the Japanese attitude toward work, and yes, it's distinctly unfair toward the workers. This attitute is a holdover from the time when the typical Japanese company was very much like a family, and the management gave you lifelong work & actually gave a crap about your quality of life. The management would often lend you money to buy a house, and bosses frequently tried to introduce salarymen to their future wives.

Nowadays, though, the management has adopted Western "f*** you, workers" standards, including massive layoffs and having as much as 90% of the workforce provided by "temping" companies (The quotation marks are intentional. Many of the "temp" employees have been around for 2, even 5 years, working through the "temp" agency, getting less pay & benefits than real direct employees of the same companies.

Sucks, dunnit.

Add to this, a little East-meets-West attitude from Japanese workers: They're likely to ignore your complaints because Western workers have a reputation for being spoiled brats, non-teamworkers, whingers, etc etc. We're likely to look at the facts and come up with the conclusion that "the squeaky wheel gets the grease" while Japanese will come up with their own proverb, "don't stick out (me dachi), be a team player. Suffer/endure to get ahead in the company. Silent suffering is rewarded."

Companies also expect that Western English teachers are an infinitely renewable, abuse-able resource. So, yes, they'll often just abuse you until you quit, then hire the next fresh-off-the-boat naive newbie.

Search around for a better employer. Even if you get fired, if the government doesn't know about a gap in your employment then you can quickly find a new employer/workvisa sponsor. Go for it.