Job Discussion Forums

[essequam]

I am working as a Junior High School ALT, some of the experiences I have had have been wierd. For example, at my school there is a room where students can go if they can't cope with lessons.
One 13 year old student let's call her Yuka comes to school one hour after classes start every day because she says she wants to avoid the other students and leaves half an hour early for the same reason. Yuka says she played truant in primary school and feels that she has improved because at least she turns up for school now. She says that she did try to attend classes last year but she was not able to fit in. The other students had established their own groups of friends.She wanted to but couldn't make friends so she's in the room.I guess that Yuka is well and truly behind in her studies because she has not attended classes for 12 months but will be moving onto 2nd year of Junior High in April anyway.
The room is locked, curtains drawn and apart from the few teachers who are timetabled in to visit the students once a week, they don't have any contact with anyone at all. I asked one of the teachers who visits the room once a week if this particular student had spoken to a psycologist and the teacher said that there is a psycologist employed by the BOE but she is too busy to consult with the students. I also asked the teacher if the students are kept up to date with the class material or taught anything and the teacher replied that she used to teach them English but the students said they wanted to stop so she did (and didn't seem concerned). A couple of weeks ago, I observed one of the students making two large yellow pom-poms for some reason, maybe a school event.
I am not a psycologist but it is obvious to me that some one who has trouble mixing with others will not improve their social skills by locking themselves in a room and subsequently falling so far behind in their studies they will have no chance of catching up. My Japanese friend said that I shouldn't take things at face value and there must be a reason why they are in isolation. True maybe there is more to it but I feel that the system is failing these would be drop-outs. There needs to be at least some effort to re-assimilate these students or offer them some counselling.
I was wondering if some of you out there feel inclined to share your experiences as an ALT and/or comment on mine.

[Glenski]

I'm not an ALT, but I work in a private high school. We have similar cases of students. They have severe social / psychological problems, and we have NO counselor or psychologist, so the homeroom teachers play those roles. In my opinion, that is useless, and students just get bumped into the next grade regardless of how much time they have missed.

I can't answer for other teachers, but we foreign English teachers are often asked to give supplemental assignments or certain favoritism for these students.

We just finished entrance exams, and because we are a private school, we depend on income from tuition. So, the last meeting on exam results was quite revealing. Enrollment is down, so we were actually considering whether to accept a few "borderline" students. They had marginally passable entrance exam grades, but their attendance was horrible...with 30-60 days a year missing, all for the reasons stated above. Desperate times...

What actually irritates me is the following situation. Sports players have no academic probation. When they miss classes on excused absences (for sports practice or games), they really feel they are excused from actually doing the work for that lesson. And, nobody does a thing about it. The baseball players have their own dormitory, but it differs from the other one for our school because it has no curfew or mandatory study period. What's wrong with this picture?

[Mike L.]

To the ALT there is an explanation for the seperate room:

A system, BOE, School Admin and Teachers that are not doing their job. I'd let the teachers off because in this system without leadership everything falls apart.

I saw the exact same thing happen in a few JHS as ALT.

What would happen if we all just said "I don't feel like it"?

I now work in a few private schools and can attest to what Glenski says.

What's goijng, in many of them, as far as academic standards, discipline and teaching for that matter is "useless."

These schools often serve as dumping grounds for the children of the wealthy who simply can't get into a decent public school for whatever reason. (maybe a Tokyo phenomenon where cenrtallylocated schools command draw the best students)

Not that education is perfect anywhere but increasingly there is such a low common denominator of schools in Japan that students are like seat warmers and teachers just faces in the classroom.

In the past this may have been true but there was discipline and thus more compulsion to study and do as your told. Teaching methods and teachers didn't need to be interesting in this route / compulsory environment.

The system produced the cannon fodder for Japan inc.

Now there's no compulsion to do anything. You can act like a wild animal. Sleep in class. Never open a book and still pass on.

Hell, You can get into many universites just by buyig your way in through the associated private school.

This education system was the envy of the world?

Unbelievable!

Sorry for the rant!

[Lynn]

I also worked as a JHS ALT. I worked with students who had "school-phobia". Instead of going to school, they would go to the youth center and hang out with an employee there. I would visit them every Wednesday. At first we did English lessons. There were four girls from 2nd year. Three of them were very smart and did very well. Eventually, I got closer and closer to them and they wanted to stop studying English, but continue to have my company. So, I wasn't really there teacher anymore. I was also pretty young (22) and we just did a lot of hanging out and talking. I got to know them VERY well.

One girl started going back to school, which was a very big step. I went to her class to see her, but she wasn't there. I asked, "Where's Ria?" and I was told she was in the nurse's room. Apparently, this was a step by step process and she wasn't ready for her classroom yet.

Another girl, Shiho, had stopped going to school from 2nd grade (age 7). It was unbelievable how uneducated she was. She couldn't read kanji and her Jpes vocab/grammar was extremely low. I remember she sometimes couldn't understand what I said in Jpes cuz the vocab was too hard for her.

Anyway, I'm not going to tell you about each individual, but long story short, each girl had her own story. I talked to the teacher at the center and he said none of them had psychological problems. Two of them went on to mainsteam high school and are now very sucessful and happy.

[chixdiggit]

Hey everybody, I thought my girlfriend could contribute to this topic better than I, so here's her thoughts.

I work at a private high school, which caters to athletes as well. However, I find that my sports students are usually my best students. I don't necessarily mean academically, but in attitude and attendance. The other students are also controlled my their homeroom teachers at my school, or if they happen to be involved in a school activity, that advisor can be asked to give them punishment. It's quite effective, but frustrating that the students don't think that all teachers deserve a certain level of respect.

I had a really frustrating situation just a few weeks ago. I give a final test the last week of school, and since my test at Xmas was a little too difficult (and resulted in almost half failing, even with the pass mark of 31%... good thing my Japanese co-teachers gave them a make-up test that they were able to pass with flying colors ) So on this test, I decided to try to make it more fun and had a full section that involved drawing pictures to show your understanding of the English terms. Since drawing are very easy to see on other students' papers, I made 3 versions of the tests, and I informed the students that if they copied off of their neighbours, they would more than likely be copying the wrong thing. As I was marking the tests, I found 3 students who had drawn a picture of a bus when the word was "computer", and it was clear that they had copied off of a neighbour who had the version with "bus" in that spot (2 of them had even copied the smoke coming from the exhaust pipe that was remarkably similar to the person who had been sitting beside them!). I knew that my school usually doesn't take anything I say seriously, so I ask my Japanese co-teacher to give them a warning because it was clear to me that they had copied. My co-teacher looked at the tests and was shocked, and went to the homeroom teachers. The homeroom teachers also went on about how shocked they were, and said that they were going to do an investigation, and if the students were found to have cheated, they would get zero on my tests, and 10days suspension. I was surprised, but pleased that they were taking action for once. The next day, I went to work and was informed that they students say they didn't understand the English words so just "drew anything". The homeroom teachers all agreed that they had cheated, but since the final exams were coming up, they didn't want the students to be suspended from writing them, so they got off with a warning. It was actually all I had asked for, but I was disappointed nonetheless.

Cheers,
Chix's GF

[TokyoLiz]

Wow, chixdiggit's girlfriend's tale is rather telling about the state of cheating in Japanese schools. It also shows how cheating here lacks serious consequences.

At the school I'm working at, we have a lot of trouble with plagiarism, and we've dealt with it by teaching a lesson on how to avoid getting into trouble by citing sources in a proper bibliography at the end of the essay.

This crash course in citing sources has helped in the English writing program (senior high school) but plagiarism continues to be a problem in the Japanese composition classes and the Kokugo teachers don't know how to deal with the problem. As a result, the kids go unpunished or uncorrected in the Kokugo class.

When I worked in Ehime-ken (back in 1999), the school board had just set up an alternative classroom at an unused elementary school building. Whenever I had a break due to exam schedules or school events, I would take a few hours out of my day to hang out with the school refusers. They ranged in age from 12 to 18, and all of them were bright, fun and energetic. They spent most of their day playing card games or reading books. They, too, had a lot of trouble reading anything beyond manga because they had missed so much school. It makes me wonder what percentage of the Japanese population is in fact functionally illiterate. Certainly, the Japanese government reports that literacy is at 99%, but from what I've seen in the classroom and in these alternative programs, there are a lot of students slipping between the cracks.

The biggest shock to me happened in a senior high school writing class. I had a list of vocabulary items that I wanted the kids to use in their compositions - things such as transitions, coordinating conjunctions and a few idioms to smooth the rough edges of their writing. When I asked a boy to come up the chalkboard and write a common word, in this case juuseki (referring to seating on trains), he could not get the kanji strokes right and resorted to writing the word in kana. This kanji, seki, is written above the courtesy seats on practically every train in Tokyo.

The Japanese education system leaves a lot to be desired. The schools go to great lengths to make the lessons uniform and get roughly the same results from all students, but perhaps they pander to lowest common denominator too often. Those students who don't put in any effort just scrape through their lessons and pass because the school shuffles the kids along from grade to grade.

That's the state of affairs here. You can't fail a grade.

[Dr.J]

My experiences are much the same. I do however feel that individual teachers bear some responsibility because they do know what is going on yet refuse to speak up about it. You can put this down to 'culture', but in the end, when a student gets a raw deal they get a raw deal and there is no excuse for at least making an effort to make things better. Sometimes I get angry because they don't even try.

I will say that there are two sides to the plagarism/cheating issue, because students are encouraged throughout their school lives to help other students, which in my view is a good thing. But of course it goes a little too far when students start getting a 'free ride' off their friends.

The school system has not found the right balance between the group and the individual.

[Iwantmyrightsnow]

I worked in an immersion school where students spent at least 50% of the day studying in English. Plagiarism was always a problem but we could usually detect it, give a F and have the student admit it.

There was one student who refused to admit her guilt, even though we could find the exact, word for word, paper online. We wanted her to fail the course and bring the parents in over it but of course managers would have nothing to do with it. Rather than support the teachers by saying this was totally unacceptable, and it would be dealt with at the appropriate level management put as being the teacher was making the complaint that meant he had students revolt on him. Instead it should have been admin saying it was totally unacceptable.

[Glenski]

In my case, we started a new class last year for a select group of 1st year students. Some had very high English speaking skills. All were chosen because they expressed an interest in reading. We gave them a separate grammar class (Japanese teacher), writing class (native English teacher, not me), and reading class (me).

Early in the year, we were told that their homework assignments would not be included in their grades. Their first term scores would only be based on major exams prepared by the department. Except for a small fraction of those tests, most of them were prepared for the lower level students in OTHER 1st year sections. So, it was much too easy for my students.

Final exams just finished. I expected to give my homework assignments into the grading committee and have them added to all of the test scores. Nope. None of my lessons would count at all (nor would those of the writiing class). Moreover, all students in this special class were automatically given 5 (an A), regardless of any scores.

Moreover, the students KNEW this, but we native teachers did NOT.

Today is the final meeting to air our views on this totally unfair situation.

Next year (beginning April, 2004), we have two, not one, sections of this same special class, so twice as many students will be in this situation.

I wonder how they justify such automatic grades to the parents of these "special students" who pay for their kids to get a fair education, and to the parents of the OTHER students who had to work for their grades.

[Mike L.]

[TokyoLiz]

Glenski,

As you know, I teach returnee English. Our program in English literature and composition is meant to keep the students' reading and writing skills at a grade level equivalent to their peers in North America.

We have a simple guideline for grading. Every student gets a 5 on their report card for what we call kikoku eigo/English Honors.

However, the students are graded on class assignments. They must achieve at least 75% in order to stay in the program. If their grades fall and they don't make the requirement, we put them on probation, call in the parents and home room teacher for a talk, and press the student to keep up with the class. This term, all my students made the grade.

75% may sound low, but the kind of performance I expect of our high school seniors - 1st year college quality writing and presentation skills - demands a lot of their skills. The students are generally very strong in composition and speaking skills in their Japanese classes.

Perhaps this is a compromise that you could pitch to your superiors at the school.

[Glenski]

Liz,
Thanks for the tip.

Mike,
Nobody ASKED for my opinion. We have 2 meetings to discuss students overall grades (based on the quota system of how many get 5's, 4's, 3's, etc.) and to discuss the borderline students. These meetings are part of the regular business here.

[guest of Japan]

I've been really busy lately, but I've been wanting to jump into this thread.

First the explanation of myself. I work in a private high school in Chiba prefecture. It is an exceptionally low level high school.

There have been a lot of valid points brought up so I will try to analyze them one at a time.

Let's begin with the OPs's issue of truancy and special classes. Quite a few of my students didn't attend jr. high. In my first year high school class of about 240 students originally, about 10 spend all day everyday in a special class with no teacher. Some of them have formed friendships with each other while others are completely socially withdrawn. Here are some other statistics to consider. About 20 students have already quit the school for financial, social, and academic reasons. Another 30 student have been on long term absence (missing at least 5 weeks or more of the present semester). After all the previously mentioned students are taken out of the equation the absentee rate is about 25%. Tardies make up an additional 25%. These are just statistics to show how little of the education that parents pay for student actually get.

Next on the list is literacy. I can't begin to quantify this, but there are certainly a lot of functionally illiterate students at my school.

Curriculum = jr. high part 2, but easier.

Plagiarism, this is the norm of the middle ability students. The better students don't do it, and the lowest students don't care enough to try to plagiarize.

Student athletes tend to be my better students. There will be exceptions mentioned later.

Scoring: 30 percent is passing. The worst students are given at least a 25 percent. The absolute minimum on the standard high school entrance examination given by the goverment is 25 points out of about 75 in case you are curious. My high school entrance exam average is 38. This is the third lowest in Chiba prefecture. The average is around 50 for the prefecture. A top tier school averages around 65.

Scoring continued: My grades are regularly changed. They almost always move in an upward direction. Personality and behavior are the dominant factors in adjusting my grades. Most of the teachers I work with ask my permission on grade adjustments. Sometimes, I can bargain. I have to give a lot to get a little.

Now for some specific things that infuriate me.
1. Today when the golf club coach was consulted because on of his student was awarded an intitual whopping 1% in my class before adjustment he replied. Well he's at a tournament for this week so he can't attend a make-up class, so please pass him. We will because my school is VERY famous for its golf team. Incidently the Japanese teacher I work with in that class is also very against it, but she knows it is a losing battle. (I'm pretty sure our top golf player is on salary. )

2. The day a big boy beat the shit out of a little girl and nothing happened to him.

3. The same day when I took a shot to the face breaking up a fight and nothing happened to either of them.

4. Print club, cell phones, manga, make-up application, curling irons, sleeping, video games, fighting, bullying and "wakanai."

5. AND MOST FRUSTRATING = IMAGE Truth is not important but image is. Education is not important but appearing to be a good school is. Teachers are told to say only positive thing on college entrance evaluations despite the fact the student hasn't done anything all year and will probably drop out of university anyway. It's just important that student get accepted to university for school advertisement. A quarter million dollar language laboratory that no one but the gaijin teacher has the faintest idea how to use. A gaijin teacher (me) just so they can say they have one. It's not important what is on a test as long as it looks visually stimulating. Ribbons and neckties given primacy over basic standards of student and human behavior. All problems must be concealed. Grades must be adjusted. Teachers stand guard at train and bus stations to make sure that the students don't vandalize them not because vandalism is wrong but students wearing our uniform while doing the vandalism is bad for the school image. As you can guess, I can go on and on, but I'll stop.

On a final note I'd like to address Glenski's frustration. Firstly it sounds like Tokyo Liz has a great system and I hope you can institute something like it. If however success comes not then I'd just like to recommend you look at it from a students point of view. There would be absolutely no incentive for students to take your advanced class if it was only going to harm their GPA. They can take a normal class and do absolutely nothing and get a great score. By taking your class at least there is the possibility that they will gain something without taking a risk. High school students don't learn for the sake of learning. They do if for scores.

I certainly understand your frustration at not knowing. That would tick me off as well. At least you'll know for next year.

And very lastly. I have only 7 more days in HELL. Although this post has been quite long and ranty I just wanted to show the path that is taken by those students sitting in special classrooms. Some of my students do overcome their jr. high problems and actually begin to learn to socialize and start to catch up on their education and aspire. Most don't. They're lost souls hidden from Japan's over-optimistic statisticians.

Sorry about the length.

[essequam]

So...I'm not the only one who doesn't get why people make such a big deal of long story short.
This week M sensei (JT) got into a panic and started pacing up and down in front of the blackboard and muttering under his breath because I took him by surprise smuggled in a CD player and played the CD and asked gist & comprehension questions instead of doing the mindless human tape recorder routine.

When I did my CELTA course, the instructors always used a tape/CD instead of reading the tapescript. For me, a tape/CD once in a while is a sensible way to go, for example, when you have a 3 part conversation between Mark and his Dad, Mr Brown and Mark's love interest, Demi .
The taped conversation usually gives the students a chance to hear the conversation at natural speed with lovely sound effects etc.
Sometimes for a change it's nice to have the kids listen with textbooks closed, AET writes some comprehension qu's on the board before listening to help draw out the target language.
Not reading the dialougue was viewed as laziness so I'll probably just do the human tape recorder thing next lesson, why bother trying to help the kids improve their listening? The kids are being programmed to memorise for the exam.....this is Japan, I am just a guest .....etc, etc, etc.

[Brooks]

at junior high I don`t remember students with emotional problems.
Sometimes some girls had stomachaches. Sometimes they were sick, sometimes not.

Bullying was a problem. Stealing too. It really bothered me since the kids generally had rich parents. So I guess it was kleptomania, really.

But at high school, yes there are some kids who need help. I wish we had at least one special ed. teacher and one counselor.
It is too much for a homeroom teacher to have 43 students and be expected to be a psychologist as well.