Job Discussion Forums

[As Das Fads]

bugger, one more thing. I usually have 40 kids in my class, with the absolute minimum being 36 in a couple of ichinensei classes. Elementary schools will try and squeeze maximum value out of you, so I will often teach double classes of upwards of 100 students.

[p_track]

I am a public school Junior High ALT (what i like to call a freelance JET)
I was hired by a private language school who advertised in the Japan Times
I am paid 300 000 yen a month and am given a subsidised apartment (1350 yen a month)
Cheap school lunch

I get 20 paid holidays plus national holidays however since the public system did away with Saturday classes, the PTA (parent teacher assosiation) felt that teachers didn`t work hard enough and forced teachers to "work" during summer vacation. Most of the time the teachers just sit around and drink coffee and play with their k-tai`s.

]The PTA is very strong at my school and force the teachers to deal with thier kids family problems and to act as probation officers on week-ends and holidays

I am not expected to participate in afterschool activities but am encouraged. I do so 4 out of 5 days a week as both a coach and teammate (I am not paid). Participating in these exciting activities gives me a lot of "street credit" at the school and allows me to get away with missing an afternoon here or there.

In terms of teaching, I am used primarily as a human tape recorder, replacing the New Horizon tapes as my Japanese is non-existant.

[Vince]

I teach at a vocational college in Tokyo and get the low-level students many of you had in high school. It's the same situation. Standards have declined to the point that there's no entrance requirements other than the cash. Students refuse to acknowledge that they're in school, until exam week comes.

I have a student who has mental problems. I've seen him staring out the window, grinning and mumbling. I told my supervisor about it, but I got the nervous smile, the hand going up to scratch the neck, the eyes drifting to the paperwork on her desk. I'm stuck with him.

[TokyoLiz]

I've taught in both public and private schools in two different prefectues.

The public school job was a JET position on Shikoku. I had four junior high schools, 40 kids in a class, 500 faces per school, rotated out each week. I never got to know the kids' names and relied on my ability to memorize name kanji - every kid was required to wear a name tag, fortunately for me.

About the teachers - I was integrated into the classroom in a Team Teaching situation in all four schools. The spoken English level of the teachers was generally quite good - almost all of the teachers were intermediate level English speakers. Two of my fellow teachers were near native fluency, and one had trained in a TESOL program in the US. Over the course of a year, the teachers gave me more responsibility in the classroom and we often broke the class into two groups for communicative activities. I brought lots of activities and methods from my Canadian classroom and learned some new ones from the Japanese teachers. The teachers had a variety of ways of teaching, not just translating the grammar.

The kids were really eager to speak English and tried really hard outside of class. I also responded to a huge volume of little letters, mostly written by girl students, helped translate comic books and Magic the Gathering cards for the boys, produced a newsletter with another ALT and student participation, and in one school we had a room set aside exclusively for English lessons. There was lots of support from the English teachers, and we hosted American teachers for a week-long exchange. I was invited to participate in after school activities, and helped out with volleyball club, visited kendo, and joined in tea ceremony and flower arranging on occasion.

I've been working for a private junior high school in Kanto region through a recruiting company. The school requires me to teach about the same volume of lessons as the publics - 20 classes per week. This situation is different, however. I'm both team teaching in the regular English classroom and teaching English communication to each class in the school, making up to 5 different lessons per week depending on the class level. The teachers' English level is generally much lower than my former colleagues in the public schools in my little town on Shikoku, and none of the teachers have any experience with TESOL and only two out of 5 teachers have studied abroad. The regular English lesson is taught entirely through the grammar translation method, and the students' level is considerably lower than the kids I saw in the old schools.

I've seen lots of kids with problems in this school, ranging from mental health and behaviour issues to Autsistic tendencies. At the end of this spring term, 5 students left the school - I was told they were going into the public schools. All 5 have big behaviour problems and regularly disrupt lessons. I have a hunch they were shamed out of the school.

In all the classrooms, teachers experienced really distrubing behaviour problems - violence and verbal abuse towards teachers and students, tantrums, truancy and destructive behaviour. Frequently the students didn't respond to the lesson at all, setting back the curriculum goals. I learned from the other teachers that it wasn't just me. Many of the teachers had to scale back their lessons and curriculum because behaviour problems held up the classroom.

I was expected to produce the curriculum outline for the year, make all materials, teach solo, mark quizes and assignments, teach from a core textbook that everybody loves to hate, including teachers, (Junior Jam), produce listening test materials and grade the students.

Because of the huge volume of prep (the textbook was neither challenging nor interesting) and the great stress of having to invent everything from scratch with little guidance from the head teacher, I didn't have time to join in club activities.

The administration at the school was under the impression that I didn't understand much of what was going on because of the language problem, but they didn't realize that my aural comprehension of Japanese is quite high. I learned lots of ugly things about the school - the administration was very strict and gave off quite a negative vibe. An one occasion, some teachers were demonstrating a toy, essentially realia, to be used to demonstrate the language point in a lesson. I was really happy to see that they were bringing in something tangible and motivating for the students. The VP verbally reprimanded them for playing with a toy in the staff room and told them under no uncertain terms that they could not use the object in their lesson.

On top of everything, I was paid considerably less than the JET ALT salary - 250,000, the rate for many of the recruiting companies.

So I quit.

I've got part 2 to post, of course. I start at a new private school in September. I'll report about that when I get there...