Becoming a Computer Science teacher in Japan?

7 comments

1. Do you want to teach computer science in Japanese or English?

2. [deleted]

3. Get a license and then apply for international schools

4. If this is your plan you are really only looking at international high schools.

   for this you would really need
   1. a teaching certificate
   2. teaching experience in that field
   3. be patient because there wont be much demand for his out there

5. The reason all you hear about is English education is because that’s the only field where there are no professional requirements, and people are not hired as teachers but rather assistants. There are legit English teachers here, but because of problems with how the assistants are labelled and how the jobs are advertised, people think the ALT/Eikaiwa business and attached jobs are actual teaching positions, and that’s nearly all that gets discussed.

   Becoming an actual teacher for a subject in an actual school is the same for all subject areas, and STEM teachers are actually more in demand than English teachers for international schools. You’ve got two avenues to try to be a comp sci teacher here, and the biggest difference between the two is going to be the required level of Japanese. One is to become an international school teacher, which means getting a license and a few years experience in your home country and most likely getting experience outside of Japan before trying to break in here.

   The other option is the same in the first steps, except you’ll also need to invest the ~5 years necessary to learn how to teach your subject in Japanese, which would open up positions in normal Japanese high schools. Pulling off the language requirement outside of Japan would be nearly impossible though, and you’d likely need to get here on some other job, work on your language and connections, and then break in to private high school. HS positions for comp sci would be rare though, and you’d likely be aiming for college. Unfortunately the college scene here is about as bad as it is in America, in any big city at any non-bottom tier university you will need a minimum of a master’s in your subject, experience teaching in college, and two publications to your name just to get part time assistant professor/adjunct work that’s non-permanent.

   If you’re dead set on HS, you’ll have to network for a while to find any place that has CS positions, and you’ll have to find one that’s willing to hire a foreigner through a traditional contract which would also likely come with homeroom, club, admin, and weekend responsibilities. Such a position is really rare, but the people that can fill them are also very rare so it would likely just take networking until you get lucky and meet the right person to get you in.

6. You’d have to be in a pretty forward-thinking school to teach computer science in Japan.

   Computer knowledge in high schools in this country seems to be between “none” and “I have seen a keyboard”.

7. I teach Computer Science with a recently opened program that’s adjunct to the cram and eikaiwa school that share my building (It’s kind of like an Eikaiwa for programming). I mostly teach in Japanese, but have a couple students who’s parents insist I do the full class in English. Computer Science is unfortunately only like 1/10th of what I do, most of my hours are spent doing clerical work for the cram school and I have as many or more classes each week tutoring high school students studying for college entrance exams.

   I don’t think I could recommend this position as the base pay is extremely low (less than $2000 a month). Luckily my salary was grandfathered in when I got transfered to the education division of my company so I still make significantly more. 60 to 80 hour weeks aren’t great, unfortunately.