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Brooks
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Posts: 1369
Location: Sagamihara
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 Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 7:44 am Post subject: |
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yes Andare, at the the school where I work there is a university which has paid Westgate to send teachers to teach its university students.
I also know people that used to work for Westgate. Two of them were working on their MAs and one had already finished. As far as teachers go, two are competent and one was tolerable (at Westgate), although later he lost his marbles and left Japan.
You are in central Europe. What do you know about this situation in Japan?
Put down your pilsner.
Things are getting grim not only for foreign teachers with advanced degrees but even for my Japanese wife, who has a MA in TESOL from an American college.
She works at a university in Kanagawa, and falling student numbers means that there may be a shakedown in the near future.
She may be able to stay another year or not. Who knows at this point.
The pay for koma sucks compared to other universities, and part-timers get stuck with extra work, which is not always paid.
So that means it is good to have an exit plan for somewhere else in Japan or for the US.
Last edited by Brooks on Fri Jun 03, 2005 11:34 am; edited 2 times in total |
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Andare
Joined: 08 Jul 2003
Posts: 43
Location: Czech Republic
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| Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 10:15 am Post subject: |
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I asked for relevancy, not rehashed rubbish. Students (or more accurately their parents) pay 100,000 yen each for two terms (100 lessons) of non-accredited lessons with Westgate. The university pays nothing. How do I know this? Westgate told me, and more importantly,so did the students at both university premises I've taught on. The university provides the rooms free of charge through their extension college programme.
If your figures were correct, cloth ears, then I'd be earning around two thirds of 100,000 yen x 32 students. Hey, I'm quids in.
And what's with all this "I can fail my students" rot anyway? Do you get a kick out of failing them? Do you people start your classes with, "I'm Paul, I'm a real professor, and I can fail every single one of you?" I bet all your students want to be just like you when they grow up.......
Incidentally, I have met some Westgate instructors who conformed to your greenhorn, just off the boat stereotype. I've also met some who were in their fifties, probably had more qualifications than you and were here to experience Japan for a few months. As for the students, most of them pay to take the course because they want to improve their oral fluency (maximum Westgate class sizes are 12 students, as opposed to the 40-45 they can get in a uni class). I suppose you get good and bad in every profession. Some professors here will be dedicated, hard working professionals, others will be stale and bitter, out of touch with their homelands and stuck in a rut in Japan because they can't hack it back home.
What do students get out of Westgate? It varies. Some kids in my class have paid for three years of classes. Some of their teachers they really liked, some just scared them. Most just like having real people teaching them who they have something in common with. |
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Andare
Joined: 08 Jul 2003
Posts: 43
Location: Czech Republic
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| Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 10:18 am Post subject: |
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Brooks, I'll type this really slowly:
Just because I didn't change my location when I came back to Japan, it doesn't mean I'm not really here.
Can I pick my beer up now?
Literal minds are cool. |
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PAULH
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Posts: 4672
Location: Western Japan
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| Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 11:43 am Post subject: |
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| Andare wrote: |
IAnd what's with all this "I can fail my students" rot anyway? Do you get a kick out of failing them? Do you people start your classes with, "I'm Paul, I'm a real professor, and I can fail every single one of you?" I bet all your students want to be just like you when they grow up.......
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Then I assume you have never had students that turn up to 3 classes out of 15, are asleep through 2 of them and then at the end of term demand you pass them. Students who think if they write a one page essay littered with grammatical errors as a make up exam you will pass them, or the office will pass them for you.
Students who think a bum on a seat means an automatic passing grade.
I dont like failing students but I will if I have to. You need to set boundaries for your students or they will walk all over you.
| Quote: |
| others will be stale and bitter, out of touch with their homelands and stuck in a rut in Japan because they can't hack it back home.. |
More tired cliches |
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Andare
Joined: 08 Jul 2003
Posts: 43
Location: Czech Republic
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| Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 12:47 pm Post subject: |
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Still waiting for relevancy. Or maybe you would like to tell me my name and shoe size. After all, you were spot on about my salary. Surely you have some facts to back up your lazy slurs, Paul?
Last edited by Andare on Tue Jun 14, 2005 5:22 am; edited 1 time in total |
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moot point
Joined: 22 Feb 2005
Posts: 441
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| Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 1:41 pm Post subject: |
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Doesn't it seem strange that people feel that their authority to fail students is a reflection on their teaching abilities?
I always thought a teacher would rather brag about how they were able to increase their students communicative/wriiting/debating/etc. skills over the course of a term. Or at least brag about bringing their TOEIC/TOEFL scores up over a couple of hundred points. Bragging about failing students is just displaying one's poor effort at teaching (mind you I DO sincerely sympathise with those of you teaching courses that your students have absolutely no interest in -- in that case, we could split the blame between you and your institution but it still doesn't leave you off the hook). |
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PAULH
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Posts: 4672
Location: Western Japan
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| Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 1:52 pm Post subject: |
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| moot point wrote: |
Doesn't it seem strange that people feel that their authority to fail students is a reflection on their teaching abilities?
I always thought a teacher would rather brag about how they were able to increase their students communicative/wriiting/debating/etc. skills over the course of a term. Or at least brag about bringing their TOEIC/TOEFL scores up over a couple of hundred points. Bragging about failing students is just displaying one's poor effort at teaching (mind you I DO sincerely sympathise with those of you teaching courses that your students have absolutely no interest in -- in that case, we could split the blame between you and your institution but it still doesn't leave you off the hook). |
Not sure if this is a backhanded swipe at me, but the only time I mention failing students is in the first class when I say if they miss too many classes. They get the idea loud and clear (in a sometimes subtle and unspoken way) that the consequences for not turning up to class are there.
Anyway at many universities second year students will often tell the freshmen coming in who is a strict marker, who is soft and its not always necessary for you to spell it out for them.
After a few come back to you with a D do they know you mean business even if you never mention it again or lord it over them. Students know you have power over their grades and there is no need to flaunt it. Then you can tell them why they failed the class by pointing out attendance or tests they missed etc.
Anyway, I can not make the students study or learn if they dont want to. At university its up to them to learn to do things for themselves and take some responsibility for their own learning. |
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moot point
Joined: 22 Feb 2005
Posts: 441
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| Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 2:08 pm Post subject: |
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PaulH wrote:
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| Anyway, I can not make the students study or learn if they dont want to. |
Yes, you can. It is a matter of establishing motivation for the students to learn. I think you are selling yourself short, here.
But now we are way off topic from the original thread. I think I'll take your quote and start a new one, if you don't mind? |
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PAULH
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Posts: 4672
Location: Western Japan
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| Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 2:13 pm Post subject: |
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| moot point wrote: |
PaulH wrote:
| Quote: |
| Anyway, I can not make the students study or learn if they dont want to. |
Yes, you can. It is a matter of establishing motivation for the students to learn. I think you are selling yourself short, here.
But now we are way off topic from the original thread. I think I'll take your quote and start a new one, if you don't mind? |
I was referring more to getting students to do homework and actuall be interested and motivated in English. You can lead a horse to water but you cant make him drink, sometimes and i have had many students where you wonder what they are doing there. Especially when they are asleep from working until 3 am.
Be my guest. |
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moot point
Joined: 22 Feb 2005
Posts: 441
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| Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 2:31 pm Post subject: |
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PaulH wrote:
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I was referring more to getting students to do homework and actuall be interested and motivated in English. You can lead a horse to water but you cant make him drink, sometimes and i have had many students where you wonder what they are doing there. Especially when they are asleep from working until 3 am.
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I understand and sympathise. But even mentioning it that way is simply whinging. As ESL teachers in Japan, whether it being a PhD student who's well on his/her way to gaining a Nobel prize or the 2-year old whose mom feels they need to learn a foreign language, we encounter the same problem every day. This is the reason I started a new thread. |
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DerbyJohn
Joined: 28 Feb 2005
Posts: 25
Location: Tokyo, Japan
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| Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 2:29 pm Post subject: |
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Hi
I just applied yesterday for Westgate. I am a qualified teacher and, like many others, no doubt, I was attracted by the status and ' ' of teaching at a university. Reading this thread has given me a reality check, however. Seems like it's just an eikeiwa by another name - and a dodgy one at that!
When I get to Japan (mid August), it'll be my first EFL teaching experience(although I've a year's ESOL teaching here in England) and I'm not about to start by putting others out of work! Nothing for nothing, as they say.
Thanks for the info. guys.
John |
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J-kun
Joined: 13 Mar 2004
Posts: 43
Location: The Hell of Pachinko
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| Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 10:24 pm Post subject: |
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| taikibansei wrote: |
Regarding your "teaching holiday," you came here for a 3-month paid visit--oh, and you also "taught." Good on you! Of course, regardless of what Westgate told you, your little visit to the Far East cost someone their job.
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If only a tiny fraction of Westgate teachers teach accredited classes, how can the above be true? Are universities offering less English classes for credit? When I worked for Westgate, I remember that out of the hundred or so at training only a handful were going to teach for credit classes and give actual grades.
I didn't have any delusions about being a prof, but I did like teaching university students and I know that I didn't take anybody's job!
When qualified teachers do lose their jobs to less qualified people provided by Westgate and the like, whose fault is it? Blame the market and cheap, short sighted administrators, not the teachers.
Also, I don't believe that universities pay Westgate for providing extra curricular classes. Why on earth would they? I was told that Westgate pays the university for use of their classrooms. |
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PAULH
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Posts: 4672
Location: Western Japan
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| Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 10:40 pm Post subject: |
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[quote="J-kun"]
| taikibansei wrote: |
I didn't have any delusions about being a prof, but I did like teaching university students and I know that I didn't take anybody's job!
When qualified teachers do lose their jobs to less qualified people provided by Westgate and the like, whose fault is it? Blame the market and cheap, short sighted administrators, not the teachers.
Also, I don't believe that universities pay Westgate for providing extra curricular classes. Why on earth would they? I was told that Westgate pays the university for use of their classrooms. |
Teaching at a university doesnt make you a professor, and you have to be a salaried university employee anyway.I work full time at a university, have my own office and dont consider myself a professor as i dont have a PhD yet, and my job title is not kyouju or jo-kyoju (associate professor). there is a definite pecking order within universities and for someone from a conversation school who doesnt work for a university to call them selves a professor is acting under false pretences.
You are a professor when you get promoted into to that position, not when you happen to get a part time job teaching on a campus.
PS my job title is Tokubetsu ninki (term limit) eigo sensei (which roughly translates as full time non-permanent English lecturer), NOT a professor.
Professors are reserved for those who have earned the title, much like one can not call yourself a "doctor" without a phD. |
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J-kun
Joined: 13 Mar 2004
Posts: 43
Location: The Hell of Pachinko
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| Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 11:08 pm Post subject: |
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| PAULH wrote: |
there is a definite pecking order within universities and for someone from a conversation school who doesnt work for a university to call them selves a professor is acting under false pretences.
You are a professor when you get promoted into to that position, not when you happen to get a part time job teaching on a campus.
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Yes, of course. I don't even know what my title was with Westgate. I used "eigo no kyoushi," which is a pretty humble way to say you're a teacher (lower than sensei), when I had to tell someone what I did.
Nobody is suggesting that Westgate teaches are professors. Not even close. Which is why this whole thread got started: Why are westgate teachers getting "professor" visas when they are so obviously not? It sounds like a lame attempt by Wetgate to keep their employees from working anywhere else. |
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taikibansei
Joined: 14 Sep 2004
Posts: 811
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2005 7:12 pm Post subject: |
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J-kun, I've responded to many of these comments/questions in other, very recent, threads, so you'll be getting the 'reader's digest' version here.
| J-kun wrote: |
| Blame the market and cheap, short sighted administrators, not the teachers. |
Uh, that's exactly what I wrote in these other threads. E.g., here (read all three of my posts):
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/job/viewtopic.php?t=25114
and here,
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/job/viewtopic.php?t=25339
including these quotes here:
| taikibansei wrote: |
| A great job, if you can get it, and I certainly don't fault the foreigners working in dispatch companies who are taking advantage of this situation. |
and here:
| taikibansei wrote: |
This last example was all too common--i.e., a person with great ideas and a lot of potential as an instructor, but whose lack of real status at the university hamstrung her attempts to teach. Students knew she wasn't a "real" teacher in the eyes of both the department and university administration; worse, they acted accordingly, effectively ignoring the homework, lectures and classroom activities. While inexperience also played a part, I feel she was never given a real chance to succeed.
In my experience, dispatch teachers like the latter individual invariably quit after a semester or so to go on to better jobs; the ones that stayed long-term were most likely to be examples of the first two types. Of course, there were--and I'm sure still are--exceptions to this. |
and here,
| taikibansei wrote: |
| Bottom line: if most Japanese don't need English proficiency for work or school, then any incentive to demand better instruction disappears. You also get the ECC and Westgate "scabs"--again, some of whom are skilled and dedicated teachers. However, there's no reason for them to be, nor does the system reward skill and/or dedication. Since student English levels are never accurately evaluated, since English mastery is not important to most, who cares whether they learn anything or not?! Give the students foreign teachers who are young and "genki," and dispose of these teachers if and when students complain they are no longer young and genki enough. |
So, yeah, I think it should be clear that I'm in full agreement the "system" is the real problem.
| J-kun wrote: |
| If only a tiny fraction of Westgate teachers teach accredited classes, how can the above be true? Are universities offering less English classes for credit? When I worked for Westgate, I remember that out of the hundred or so at training only a handful were going to teach for credit classes and give actual grades. |
First, what exactly do you and the other Westgate veterans mean when you keep writing that the classes were "accredited" or "not accredited"? At least in the US, the accepted academic usage of this term means "given official approval to act"--e.g., "an accredited college," with synonyms including "commissioned," "licensed," "authorized," etc. At an accredited university, all classes--whether for grades or not--are necessarily accredited as well. Indeed, a quick Google search suggests that the phrase "accredited classes" is used mostly by diploma mills. ("Yeah, our classes are, uh, accredited...though, our school is not...."  )
I imagine you guys really are referring to credit/non-credit courses. My answer to you is this: how the heck do you know whether students received "credit" for those classes or not? From experience and research, your ability/inability to give "grades" says nothing. For example, at the two upper mid-ranked Japanese universities which employed me, English classes to non-English majors often were without grades. Some were "graded" pass/fail--with everyone automatically passing. Even in classes with grades, science and engineering faculty would sometimes change the failing grades earned in foreigner-taught general English courses--often without telling the foreign faculty--to ensure their students matriculated in time with their classmates. (As one Japanese faculty member explained to me, "After all, it's only English.")
So, are you basing your assertions on your attendance at the 教授会--where such decisions are made? (Doubt that highly....) Are you basing your assertions on what Westgate/ECC/Berlitz told you?! As I've noted in other posts, it's in their best interest to keep you ignorant--and judging from Andare and Julie's ugly and insulting posts--they do a great job. If you're basing your assertions on direct questions to your students, what exactly did you ask them? E.g., if you asked in English, "Are these accredited courses?" they'd look up the word for "accredited," see that it means "認定された" or "基準合格の" in Japanese and realize they had no chance at all of answering you correctly. Even if you asked using the correct term in English--"credit"--were the English skills of your non-English major students so superior that they readily understood the term to mean "単位"? If so, you need to write letters to all the researchers--mostly Japanese--who have documented that the average English vocabularies of non-majors is somewhere between 500 (my universities) and 1000 words.
However, ultimately, it doesn't matter whether the classes were for credit or not--English responsibilities traditionally met by the in-house, professional foreign faculty are being contracted out to other schools. This practice necessarily reduces the need for said foreign faculty. Indeed, as I've explained before, the bottom line is that a number of posters here either know people who have lost their jobs to these contracts or have lost jobs themselves. And yes, an argument can be made that, considering the methods and expectations of the various universities, it doesn't really matter who "teaches" the English courses. I.e., considering the uncoordinated and often irrelevant curriculums, the lack of valid and reliable testing (or even the initiative to seek such out), not to mention the limited understanding of second language acquisition theory itself, an un-trained 3-month "Westgater" (again, not the only type of "Westgater" out there) has as much chance of relative "success" as someone with multiple degrees/certificates and 20+ years of Japan-related teaching experience. It doesn't have to be this way--which is my main point--but it is.
During my 10 years teaching in Japan, I most enjoyed teaching those students who, despite the odds, still arrived in my classes willing and able to learn. Indeed, there were a number of these in each of my classes--which helped keep me going for as long as I did. However, I did this without deluding myself into believing either that the majority of my students would somehow become fluent in the one day/week I had them or that I was somehow changing the system.
In the end--and I think this is true of whatever country you teach in--you have to focus on what you can best do for the individual learners in front of you. And yes, I feel that someone trained and experienced, someone who intimately knows (from living and working there) the needs of the student population and has both the knowledge (from study/experience) and motivation (from job stability and a say in the curriculum/community) to meet those student needs will do a better job. Sadly, I can't even say that the administrations of most Japanese universities disagree with me on this--that would imply that they cared. Unfortunately, it has been my experience that, despite what they may tell you, they ultimately really do not care whether students improve long-term or not. The bottom line is money, and disposable instructors from Westgate, ECC and Berlitz are the cheapest alternatives out there.
P.m. me if you want details on the research mentioned above. |
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