Had a spat with my kids elderly English teacher last year, so decided to cross credit my Language Teaching Degree and Education Major to a Japanese University. After eventually getting all the paperwork together and acceptance letters etc, started officially on Monday via correspondence coursework and wow. What a shit show.
All reports that I have to do are in Universal Passport (think like Moodle) and teachers have zero interaction with students. All report outlines are in the syllabus, and no other information has been given.
I was under the impression (with being a native speaker, relevant degrees in both language teaching and education) that my cross crediting would waive having to do English courses, but nope, core curriculum.
So I chose to do all the English courses ahead of all the Japanese educational theory. Got directed to where the actual report outlines are and wow. It’s as bad as you’d expect.
Bearing in mind this is for a Japanese English teacher, I’m being asked to read excerpts of British authors (think Shakespeare/Tolkien etc) and analyze the evolution of language during the span of multiple writers.
The kicker though, is the reports for both Intermediate English and Advanced English grammar. One entire report is to do all the TOEIC questions out of the assigned textbook (1000+ questions), self check and submit your filled in answer sheet. The other is similar, but write a 5page report on what answers you got wrong.
For this one I actually speedran it.
276questions (6tests worth part 5 and 6) in 50mins, getting 10 wrong. I’m a master in the art of waffle but holy hell, 5 pages on 10questions is a stretch. The questions I got wrong were purely because I either filled in the wrong answer (user error) was rushing and missed something or the actual question was poorly written.
Next 18months are going to be hell, but if it means I can be in a classroom without an ALT, then so be it.
Seriously, the things you do for your kids man.
Also the elderly teacher didn’t get her contract renewed because of me and I’m bloody proud of it. I requested the BoE to sit in on her lesson, as well as for the Vice Principal to join in each lesson. She couldn’t follow the provided lesson plans, manage her time or effectively teach anything. I know she’s not the only one, but she had been terrorizing students in my city for a long time, hopefully now the next generation can undo what she did. New teacher is amazing and really is doing their best to get students to like English.
Guess the point of this is to show people how backwards it really all is and to rant a bit. The expectation level is set so low it’s mind blowing, best thing though, no where in the syllabi does it say that I cannot submit reports in English, so I have that going for me.
If anyone wants an update, let me know 😂
by DM-15