I understand that some people are passionate about teaching and education.
But looking at the turnover rate of ALT’s it’s apparent that not everyone holds teaching as a passion.
So why do you put up with it? Why choose teaching English in Japan rather than the alternative (whatever it might be)?
23 comments
Can’t speak for others but for me it was just to travel And live abroad for a bit.
I get to spend more time with my kids at home.
Apart from the rare cases where they have Japanese family or anchestey I think the most common motivation is sexual attraction to cartoon characters.
[deleted]
>But looking at the turnover rate of ALT’s it’s apparent that not everyone holds teaching as a passion.
I hate to quibble, but it’s weird how you seem to be implying that the main reason an ALT might leave their job is a lack of passion for teaching.
I wanted to gain experience to move onto positions in other countries which actually require teaching experience. Also a bucket list thing of mine was to live in Tokyo. This year I achieved that do I’m now outta here!
I wanted to live in Japan.
Gonna be completely honest, it was to escape The Great Recession. I could find lots of jobs, but they all required me to move, and few covered my moving costs. I had no interest in teaching, but teaching abroad meant that I could get at least a month’s rent deferred. I considered a few places, but Korea didn’t interest me, Saudi Arabia was a risk for me as a Jewish woman, and I already knew some Japanese. So I settled on Japan.
I didn’t intend to make a career out of it, but compared to the game industry, being an English teacher in Japan is amazing. Tons of free time and no crunch. I’m also a surprisingly good teacher, since a lot of game development skills transferred over well. I decided that I preferred a low-stress life to a high salary. That’s not a choice everyone gets to make, but I could. So, I did.
Honestly, though? I don’t recommend being an ALT for more than a year or two. It’s not a terrible job for a kid fresh out of college, especially if you just want to take your first baby-steps out of mom’s basement. But it’s not a career.
The current system using dispatch companies is not teaching, and no legitimate teacher could tolerate it for a living.
Teaching by ALTs does go on in spite of the system, but it’s at the mercy of the teacher. The system itself isn’t made for ALTs to teach.
I stayed on for years because it had set hours that allowed me to build my own business, but by the end, I loathed my company (Interac) and wanted the whole for-profit, disposable-worker ALT system to crash and burn and start again from scratch.
I’m going to be completely honest here and say that I have and still do dislike teaching. I came to Japan because it was unfortunately the only way for me get to Japan at the time. I was going to stay for only 1 year, but my first year here was so incredible I stayed for another year. Found a Direct-Hire ALT gig my second year that blew away any public ALT salary, so I am still there to this day (also, girlfriend commitments). I am slowly transitioning out though.
I actually came to Japan as a high school student way back when because I was fascinated by things like Kanji and eastern culture (my brother was a black belt in Karate, too).
This was all back in the days before YouTube and all things internet so there was a genuine exotic mystique to anything Japanese.
While at my high school here we had a couple of lovely JET teachers at my school and their experience looked like a lot of fun. So after graduating my Japanese degree I decided to come here just for one year. I enjoyed my life here, found the perfect partner so now one year has quickly become fifteen.
I don’t regret my choice to stay here at all but I think there are a couple of factors I believe that send most people running to escape ALT work. It’s not to do with passion.
The main reason is the whole dispatch teaching industry and it’s race to the bottom with low paying and completely unfair contracts. Why stay if your only prospects are staying within these low paying companies?
The other is how a lot of other foreigners here tend to look down on teachers here. I’ve had a few dismissive comments in person but normally it’s online. Expect to see this post ripped apart by some of those circle jerk cocks to prove my point.
Looking at it as a year long semi-paid vacation. ALT “teaching” seems like it’s mainly just being there to pronounce things correctly for the students. Planning to treat it like a regular office job, clock in clock out, go home, enjoy myself in Japan
I chose Japan because I had been working at Nissan in the UK. I thought I would do a year or two in an eikaiwa in Japan to pick up a decent amount of Japanese and then head back to Nissan UK and give myself a solid leg up on most of the British workers there by having some decent Japanese skills.
When I got here I figured out that the teaching job I had landed was paying almost double of what I was getting paid at Nissan UK for half the stress and with lower cost of living so I stayed.
I also disliked living in the UK as well tbh so there is that as well.
>But looking at the turnover rate of ALT’s it’s apparent that…
…dispatch ALT companies who cheat their employees out of health insurance and pension and wages are blacker than Darth Vader’s soul, ALTing is a mostly thankless job which offers zero job security unless you find one of those rare direct hire positions, and ALTs who actually want to teach but are unable to under Japanese law get frustrated and leave Japan or just leave the education field altogether.
There, I fixed it for you.
Because when you’re from Bumfuck, America, and find out that for all the shit dispatch companies are known for, and yet you STILL make more than you would in America (Technically, my salary in japan is double what I was making in America… takehome pay is less, but still WAAAY more than what I was making), plus health insurance and all that… kinda hard to dislike the job.
I actually enjoy the job, and am making decent money even through a dispatch company. The alternative is going back home to America and living in a hellhole.
I needed money and with my limited Japanese I didn’t have any other option. Plus, the job itself is nice since you work with kids and it keeps me positive.
For me the steps were something like this…
– In high school I studied Japanese and played a lot of Japanese video games. Aged 16 my mum attended a conference there and took me with her (sorta randomly) and I enjoyed the vibe. Since that experience, I was keen to live in Japan and get a ‘living overseas’ experience.
– At uni I studied teaching. After getting my bachelor’s I worked as a temp teacher while doing a masters (education). My number came up for a permanent job while I was driving home from seeing my mum in another city (~2 hours ago). They asked me if I wanted to teach in rural Australia… catch was I had to decide THEN and they wanted me there by Monday (it was a Friday at about 3:30pm). I turned it down, which put me to the bottom of the waiting list for permanent teaching jobs. After a lot of cursing how stupid the said system was, I opened up a paper and saw some gigs in Japan. Decided to apply and didn’t look back.
Why not the alternatives?
– Temp teaching sux. Pays a lot more than ALT gigs (roughly 30,000 yen a day back then) but you don’t teach, you babysit and everybody misbehaves because you’re a temp. It’s easy money once you put up a wall and decide you don’t give a shit about the kids but aged ~22, that wasn’t how I wanted to be doing business.
– Rural Australia? Look it woulda actually been quite exciting but I woulda had to spontaneously uproot. I’m pretty adventurous/spontaneous but the option I was given was just silly (and I felt robbed of a chance to teach in Australia… it felt particularly unfair being put to the end of the queue for turning down that particular job).
– Other countries? I saw a few but essentially wasn’t interested in earning a developing country wage or supporting various oppressive dictatorships. Also, I’d studied a bit of Japanese so felt more comfortable going there than (for example) Korea and Singapore (friends from uni offered to get me jobs in both of them but I just wasn’t interested).
– Europe? My older brother was a massive Europe and European history nerd. Mum gave him yearly trips to Europe with access to her credit card the whole time (my trip to Japan aged 16 was my only trip) so I sorta despised people who went to Europe then came back with pretentious stories about countries/cities I had no idea about (because I hadn’t been given that opportunity). Thus, I wasn’t interested in replicating my brother… I wanted my own thing.
Visited as an exchange student for a week during high school. So teaching in another country didn’t occur to me.
As for why I came and stayed, it comes down to timing. Graduating with a science degree with a focus on wildlife conservation, my choices were limited from the start. Graduating in the recession, I had one year of research and then the funds for my department were slashed close to 80%. I was cut.
I enjoyed my time in high school coming to Japan so I thought “Before I settle down, let’s try living in Japan.” Well, I seem to have settled in Japan rather than back home.
Do I have the passion as a teacher? Probably not. Do I do my best everyday? For sure. I know I could be doing a lot worse. I work hard and get the respect of the teachers I directly work with and those around me. Teaching is a job for me, not a passion. But it’s a good job if you work hard and distinguish yourself in the process.
It was about as far as I could get away from my family.
For me personally:
Adventure but in a more stable country in terms of economics and politics
Interest in said country
Wanting to get a real chance to go and live abroad for the first time. (technically second, but eh Mexico doesn’t really count as an American)
Escaping the small town I lived in that most of the residents seem to get stuck in.
Really like the culture, studying the language, I’ve been here before and loved it, and despite the pay not being great, the job still pays better and has better benefits than my last job. The teaching is pretty fun sometimes, and overall it’s pretty easy.
I had a friend, first she said “Hey let’s teach in Korea together” I got a job she didn’t. A few years later she was like “Hey let’s apply to jet together” and I got a job she didn’t. Then I used Japan as a clean slate for coming out, met someone and stayed.
I love helping people learn, I love linguistics and language acquisition theory, and I enjoy being in japan.
That said, being an ALT at this point is a temp thing until I decide to try to get my japanese teaching license. Who knows when/if that will happen, of course.