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[guest of Japan]

I've got some time on my hands and I was wondering if I could get some comparative opinions on some things that have been bothering me. I'll try to keep this well organized for easy quoting as there are a number of different topics of discussion.

1. Administration. My private high school is a family owned business. The school opened a little over 100 years ago and catered to the affluent class. The atmosphere is extremely conservative. A jte described it to me as the teachers being samurai under the shogun (koucho sensei) and the emperor (riji chou sensei). Neither of these two have any qualifications to teach or administrate. Koucho sensei has a Phd in computer science. Under their control there is almost no discussion of pedagogy. The teachers feel there is absolutely no support and the school is a very challenging school (more on this later). All emphasis is on making money for the school. Teachers are forced to enthusiastically recommend students to universities even if the student has done absolutely nothing in the high school for three years. The students usually quit the universities they get into in the first year, but the school can then advertise that it sent many students to university.

2. Facilities. The school has about 700 students. It has one library (not very many books) and no librarian. I honestly didn't know we had a library until 3 weeks ago. There are 6 gyms. Two of the gyms function as auditoriums. There is an athletic field behind the school and the school rents a public area for special events. They are in the process of creating a new athletic facility due to be opened next year. There are hundreds of computers. There is a state of the art Sony language laboratory. If I were to guess its price tag I would put it at around $250,000. I'm the only teacher who knows how to use it as I requested an English operating manual from Sony and am the only one who has put any time into trying to learn how to use it. Classrooms are standard Japanese style.

3. Teachers. I'm the only foreign teacher. I'm responsible for the oral English part of the curriculum. More than 50% of the teachers are in their first 3 years. The school was a private girls high school until three years ago. At that time it became coed and more than doubled its enrollment of students. The teachers are wonderful people for the most part, but they are completely divided between the sexes. There is little authentic communication between the males and females. Since every English teacher I work with is female and I am male this has presented a problem.

4. Student support personnel. There's a nurse but she also has to teach a full load of classes. There are no councelors or psychologists.

5. Students. I would say at least 85 percent of them are special needs students. This includes physical, mental and emotional handicaps. The discipline problems are enormous. There is almost no disciplinary action by the school. There is no organized disciplinary procedure. There have been a few students expelled from the school since I've arrived and although they were justified they often came across as a whim of the principal because there was no previous disciplinary action taken. Hitting a teacher or assaulting another student (even a big boy to a little girl) carries no consequences.

6. The bell curve. There isn't one. I consistently get an inverse bell curve. A full 40% cannot or choose not to get a passing grade in my classes. A passing grade is 30%. 40% recieve scores higher than 80%. My third year students are taught first year Jr. High School English. My first year students are taught first year, first month Jr. High School English. About 10% of my students do not know how to write their names using the alphabet. They are not very good at doing it in Japanese either.

7. Why? Why do they pay me to work there. I've asked Japanese teachers this question and there reply is that it gives students the opportunity to interact with a native speaker. So my next question is why not make oral English and elective class instead of required curriculum. This one gets me no answer

8. Class size and length. It's been proven long ago that the best way to teach special needs student is to do in small classes by teaching through short manageable activities. Yet my school has class sizes of 40. Actually that is only in theory since 25% of students are absent on any given day. And lessons are 90 minutes. 90 minutes!!!! Where is the logic in this?

Anyway, I wrote this rather long post in the hope of hearing how other situations compare. I am a trained and experienced high school teacher (albeit social studies). I have taught students like these before and excelled at it but they were native English speakers and the class sizes were much smaller. I very much enjoy teaching high school students, but have no desire to walk into another situation like this again, so I would very much appreciate hearing about how other teachers' experiences compare. Thanks, Mark

[Brooks]

you have it rougher than I.
Your school is at the bottom.

My class sizes vary. From as small as 6 students to as many as 35.
Classes are fifty minutes long.

At private schools, the academic ability is declining yearly. Private schools have to compete with each other for students. Schools don`t have a bar. They will take who can pay.

My school doesn`t have special ed. I wish it did. I have one student who has ADD.
No psychologists. They used to have one that came once a week. Sometimes
I feel I am a counselor.

My school has more room and money. A new high school is being built.
Our campus is big. It goes from kindergarten all the way to graduate school.

Our school is "family owned". All the presidents have been from the same family.

I am one of four American teachers.
I feel needed here. The English drama club does well and students are encouraged to study abroad. Some of our classes are oral communication classes.

[Glenski]

guest of Japan,

Your situation sounds familiar. There are differences between our schools, but here is my situation just for comparison.

1. 1. Administration.

My private junior/senior high school is a chain escalator school. My particular branch opened 7 years ago. Many teachers come and go with the 3-year rule. A few get tenure and stay longer. Since this is a private institution, we of course are in this business to make money, but we try to tout an excellent reputation as well (perhaps partly because of the escalator link to the university). However, we have two curriculum tracks for university-bound students: one for the branch U, and another for non-branch related U's. I think the difference actually takes place in the final year of classes.

2. Facilities. Each of our high school classes is about 400-450 students. We have an excellent computer facility in our library and other rooms, but we also have very few books, whether in English or Japanese. Most of the English books are graded readers. We have 2 gyms, and they are both used for various assemblies as well as sports practices. Our outdoors playing field for football/soccer is gravel, not grassy. Adjacent to it is a baseball field, but even though students practice on it, there is never a game held there.

3. Teachers. We have 4 FT foreign teachers and 2 PT foreign teachers, all for English, plus 1-2 PT foreign teachers for other languages. The junior high has had its lesson plans well-organized over the past 5 years, so that most lessons are "canned" packages. This is not so for the high school, and people seem to be reinventing wheels every year. Few lessons are recycled, and few lesson materials are kept from year to year because of the 3-year teacher turnover rule. All teachers (foreign and Japanese) may be assigned to JHS or HS during any year, so you don't necessarily stick to one group of students from year to year. We don't seem to have any segregation of sorts based on gender, just on seniority/tenure.

4. Student support personnel. We have a couple of nurses who do not teach classes. No counselor (pretty standard throughout Japan). One teacher usually rotates into the position to help students select university courses.

5. Students. Can't say how many "special needs" students we have, but they exist. They are discussed as each year begins so that subsequent teachers learn of the issues before they take over the students. Good system, I think. We, too, have pretty much no disciplinary system. First month of the school year, every teacher has to take special bus stop or building entrance duty to enforce dress code, but after that, it goes downhill as it's left up to individual teacher's efforts. Perpetually late students get a "yellow card" that must be signed for a week as they come in by 8am as their sole punishment. The biggest complaint I have is no academic probation for the students in clubs or on sports teams. Smokers are sent home for a week. Students with perpetual problems are hard to kick out because of the school reputation. We have a disciplinary committee, but its rules and direction seem pretty petty to me.

6. The bell curve. This truly rings a bell with me, and I have written a couple of messages here in the past. Students must get less than 40% to fail, and even that is hard to do. We have a strict guideline (quota) of how many students "must achieve" certain grades. Weird. We have 3 years of junior high English classes, followed by 3 years of high school English, but it's still hard for the HS kids sometimes just because of the traditional way that JHS classes are taught (little oral communication) and the reinvention of wheels in HS lessons that I mentioned earlier. We have just instituted a division in our first year students that has one group comprised of students who were all taught in this school's JHS, and another group who were taught from other JHS's.

7. Why? Why do they pay me to work there. They have no choice. The government makes it a requirement, even for private schools. Why do YOU teach it? Because Japanese teachers are not qualified for the oral end of it.

8. Class size and length. Only recently have the public schools downsized their classes. Private schools keep the class numbers high because it keeps the number of teachers (and the money spent on them) down. My school has classes of 40-45 students. Two years ago, my school had 90-minute classes. Now they are 45 minutes long. In my opinion, 45 minutes is too short to teach something effectively. The 90-minute classes were instituted because universities have classes that long, and our school felt it would better prepare students for such an environment. Some people eventually grew tired of this and saw that it had a more adverse effect. Such classes were too long for such young students, so they argued for a change and got it.

[guest of Japan]

Brooks and Glenski thank you very much for your replies. They are indeed helpful for comparison.

Glenski I did not know that private high schools were required to have a foreign teacher. Also, I realize that most Japanese teachers spoken English ability is quite low. My school has a few exceptions. The reason I asked why they have me teach it is because the English ability of my students is so incredibly low that even the low level English speaking teachers at my school would have no problem in challenging the students in spoken English. Heck most of the science and math teachers could do it. Forgive me I'm ranting.

This is a little off subject, but today I was actually praised by the jte I taught with today. She thought I had a great lesson. It was fun. The students were involved for the most part. The problem was it wasn't a great lesson. It was a bonus lesson since we've finished our testing and still have a week of classes to go. The lesson had very little structure, no finite goals, and virtually no practicallity for learning English as the majority of the lesson points were either substantialy beyond the students English ablility or were pretty much useless points for students to learn. The first half of the lesson was a Christmas word search. Then the students had to either draw the new vocabulary or write an equivilant English word. The second half was a listening exercise where the students had to listen for missing word in a Backstreer Boys song. The students enjoyed it, but I don't consider it to be good. If I did this kind of lesson all the time it seems the students would be happy and the Japanese teachers would be happy, but it is not effective teaching and I would lose my job because the company that hired me would not be happy and my students would not improve their English. Rant over.

[vash3000]

...it is not effective teaching and I would lose my job because the company that hired me would not be happy and my students would not improve their English. Rant over.

Actually, you would not lose your job...you would likely be praised. Happy students + happy jte = happy company.

Your students may not learn any English, but that doesn`t really matter.

I commend you on your integrity.

Cheers!
V.

(I really enjoy Japan, but I think it`s very dangerous and potentially self-destructive to identify your role here as anything other than an entertainer/counselor/buddy/goldfish.)

[Glenski]

[guest of Japan]

Glenski,
Perhaps I misunderstood you. I asked why they paid me to do my job. You answered that they have to (even the private schools). Perhaps you made a joke that went over my head. I understood it to mean that all high schools have to have an ALT. We obviously had a mix up.

Thanks for your reassurances in regards to my lesson. It was also quite nice to hear how you do your lessons. I don't have anyone to compare notes with at my school, so it's nice to get a little professional discourse from time to time.

Vash 3000,
Unfortunately your equation over simplifies matters. My contract is based on a negotiation between my company and the school principal with consultations by the head English teacher. Other than teacher room gossip the English teachers don't have a whole of power over me. My company has the ultimate power over me. I have to submit a curriculum each semester to both the principal and my company. I also have to submit lesson reports to my company saying what material was covered. At the end of the terms I give a final examination in both speaking and writing. Copies of my tests must be submitted to the company and be reviewed by the head English teacher. My fellow English teachers tried to pull a last minute coup on my most recent exam. They felt it was much too difficult for the students. Upon review by the head teacher I was the only one standing. The scores came out higher than even I expected.

Thank you for your praise of my integrity.

As for your last sentence, I do believe there is truth to it, but self-respect keeps me from taking on the roles you prescribe. Self-destruction builds character.