Hello!
Do any of you use some Japanese when you teach your classes? Is your company really strict on you for using Japanese in the classroom?
Higherups came to watch me teach. They said I did good but told me to not use Japanese in my classes. They said it's a rule the BOE made for ALT's. I find this so hard to do especially when I'm the main English teacher and the other teacher in the room is just the Homeroom Teacher, not the English teacher. As a trilingual person, this is such a difficult way to learn. (Side note, my parents thought that I would pick up my ethnic language just by speaking to me but I didn't understand anything, which is why I hate this dumb rule)
I get why they don't want us to use it because they don't want us to mistranslate anything and to only foster an English environment but I am struggling so much with certain classes. There's a JHS student who LITERALLY doesn't understand anything I say in English. I am making it as easy as I can. When I asked him to highlight something, I literally SHOWED him and used baby english. At this point I was literally doing Pictionary with him for 5 minutes to HIGHLIGHT A LINE. He had no fucking clue what I was saying until I said it in Japanese and that's when he understood. I struggle having to teach him cause he literally has no idea what I'm saying.
What do you do? Do you sneak Japanese in your lessons or do you not really care about what the higherups say? Any advice?
Edit: Thanks to everyone for the kind responses! I think some people are misunderstanding what I'm saying though, I'm not teaching entirely in Japanese. I only use it to explain a vocab word a student may not understand after I exhausted all resources to help them get a better understanding. Hope that clears things up.
Edit 2: Redditors will never disappoint me when there always has to be people having arguments or being mean over something no matter what the OP post is about. xD Please be kind to each other and if you're being a butthead I hope you have the day you deserve. 🙂
by potatodesuu