Licensed teacher considering relocation

6 comments

1. When you say private school, are you asking about Japanese private schools vs Japanese public schools? Or going into International Schools vs Japanese schools? As for “ESL life,” do you mean ALTs in schools vs Eikaiwa teachers in the Conversation Schools?

   Unless you can get a gig at an International School, you may be better off staying in SEA until you are ready to go back to the US. The sad unfortunate starting wage for ALT or Eikaiwa is about 200,000 yen per month. Sure, some pay 250,000 but others pay 190,000 so thinking you’ll get maybe 225,000 might be reasonable. Most will not pay your flight here, not provide an apartment.

   Does coming in to “start” having experience or being licensed help here? Not really. Licensed in the US doesn’t matter in Japan UNLESS you get a job at an American International School.

   That all said, an ALT is often pretty lacking in tasks. Some schools overwork them but most have them go to a few classes a week, serve as a human tape recorder, and then hope they don’t mess anything up.

2. >I was wondering if anyone knew whether the private school subject teaching life was as hustle-bustle as the ESL life or not?

   Assuming you meant “are International school jobs as busy as eikawa work?”, it highly depends on your company, location and work hours. Also your personal preferences. Eikawa in general have late work hours so may be good for someone who prefers to have mornings off to ‘do stuff’, but not good for someone who will just sleep until it’s time for work in the late afternoon and then go back to sleep after work.

   >If I were to get a job and she came with me (dependent visa), would she be able to find work in an English center?

   Again, assuming ‘English center’ you mean ‘eikawa’, then yes. Your wife can work on a dependent visa, and with the current state of tight border controls, she’ll have the advantage of already ‘residing in Japan’ when applying for jobs.

   >Does the region heavily affect my position opportunities?

   For international schools, yes. Japan doesn’t have many accredited international schools, think somewhere below 30 for the whole country. Obviously most of these will be centred around the major cities (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya).

   Rather than trying to ‘pick’ your city, if you’re set on coming to Japan, you’re better off just applying to any school that has an opening, because they’re scarce and competitive. Unless you’re confident in your ability to ‘stand out’ as an applicant then sure, you could try only applying to schools you’re interested in.

3. She can find a job here.
   There are many Pinoy ALTs now

4. I don’t know if this is helpful to some of the info you were seeking, and ill just piggyback on what others have mentioned.

   I am a licensed ESL teacher in the USA (Massachusetts and NJ state DOE) and I worked at a private (unaccredited international school) in Tokyo and my salary was pretty good- 340,000 a month. My workload during the day was pretty busy but not to the point where I was taking things home with me to finish after school (like I was in the US). I taught 5 classes per day and had 2 planning periods a day. It was a very good job. The only downside was that I was also expected to participate in 学校説明会 and open campus events nearly every other weekend (no additional pay).

5. There’s a lot of terms being minced in this thread, and on this board in general, so I’ll clarify a few things in the context of Japan.

   First, ESL is not the same as ALT/Eikaiwa, which is almost exclusively EFL and is also nearly always untrained/unlicensed work and as such the pay, stability, and workload reflects that.

   Secondly, for “licensed” teaching in Japan only the accredited international schools here will accept any sort of license from abroad. The only way to teach with a license in a public/private school are to get the standard license (4 year Japanese college + testing and in class training hours) or one of two special category licenses that are more limited, one of which is really rare to get and the other is much more limited in what you can do with it.

   Third, as has been mentioned elsewhere, Japan is notorious for schools being called “international” but not actually being accredited, and are no different than any other private school. Meaning you’ll be an ALT, not a teacher, even if you have a license from abroad.

   Lastly, legit teaching jobs here are really competitive, the international school bracket here has people in tenured positions and they get hundreds of applications every season from strong candidates. You’d have to be willing to go pretty countryside to lower the competition and even then it would be rough. International schools here don’t need teachers from the Arts, they’re short on STEM though.

   So your license isn’t likely to do you much good in Japan, and you’d likely have to take an ALT position at a private school, even with experience and relatively good credentials. If you have a master’s there’s a chance you could go to a smaller city and get a college job, but those usually require making connections first.

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