Hey everyone,
I had an issue at my former school which became a toxic work environment. I struggled with the Japanese staff and after a year they stopped speaking to me. They wouldn’t respond to a good morning or ask me any questions related to English teaching material.
My main issues came from students. They would recoil when I would give feedback. Laugh at me in zoom classes. Not greet and all this on a wide spread scale.
I taught forty kids in a room and did shout at them when they got out of line. My main issue being that their behavior totally changed once Japanese teachers left the room.
I realized that my behavior had a really bad effect on my relationship with them and I changed but it was damaged.
I changed at my new employer and made a greater effort to control myself with them, but I still have quite a few students who will be disrespectful or just shake in terror when I try to engage with them, but thankfully better than before.
Any advice or sharing similar experiences would be helpful.
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UPDATE: It always takes a few days for the trolls to come out and try to spoil the fun. The whole point of this is to be able to gain advice during difficult situations without writing out a novella. The newest comments are just here for trolling, full of assumptions, reading and expanding on whatever the reader wants to see and even an attempt to post this on Japancirclejerk, and for what purpose? To try to bring someone down, attack them with vitriol for some sense of…I don’t even know. The most dangerous assumption here is that any teacher experiencing any kind of setback must be a failure and leave the job because “obviously” everything would have been covered at uni or during training and that leaves no room for anything to go wrong in a classroom. This is naive. Thanks again for all the constructive energy. Trolls, save your energy.
10 comments
You asked the wrong question. You should reflect on why you believe students and staff are fearful of you. A major red flag is that you said you yelled at your student. That’s going to make Japanese people cautious of you because you seem legitimately dangerous. For me, yelling or getting angry is a clear sign that you lost control and students will lose respect for you and it’s going to be very hard to gain it back. I’ve had very difficult students who struggled with behavior issues but still respected me because I treated them decently but firmly with clear rules and expectations about Do’s and Don’t’s.
The reason they change when the Japanese staff leave is because you don’t present yourself as someone they should look up to or respect, which in my opinion, is not a normal thing to happen in a Japanese classroom unless something is going really wrong. You don’t really give enough detail about the situation to give advice, but just reflect on your presentation, your attitude, your demeanor, and students will follow suit.
And you should not even think about disrespect notion. You seem to focus extremely heavily on it in your post which is going to make your attitude toxic and your coworkers and students will notice it. In my opinion, it’s also very authoritarian and old fashioned.
Do you have actual teacher training, and have you taught under the guidance of someone whose gotten an actual license or in a practicum?
Classroom management, student teacher relationships, and lesson structure are all quite difficult for people who go through all of the above and get a teaching license/experience, for someone who hasn’t done any graduate/postgrad education on the subjects I would imagine it would be nearly impossible to do correctly.
On top of this, do you speak Japanese? If the answer is no to both of the above questions, I think your employer is unfortunately setting you up for failure and you need a lot of professional development to fix your problems.
Jesus Christ, what tf do you do with your students?!?! I don’t know a lot about your teaching jobs but I didn’t think you were allowed to strongly discipline the kids since you aren’t as such a “qualified” teacher (unless you actually have teaching qualifications in Japan in which case I apologize)
Also…. they’re KIDS. You’ll get a few who will hate English and mess about and not pay attention. Scaring them stiff won’t do you or them any good at all. And kids will laugh at you regardless of what you do. It appears that you hate it when kids seem to disrespect you, and if that is the case then maybe teaching kids isn’t for you. I have NEVER shouted at my students even if they were being a bit noisy. If anything I’d walk around the room and they’d behave as I was delivering the lesson. As a kid I hated being shouted at, so I wouldn’t do it to my students.
Anyway I hope your situation improves but I’d consider perhaps teaching adults instead.
A few of my students were scared of me at the start too in my new job.
But that’s only because my environment changed from serious, not fun, and rule abiding to fun, and loose rules. Once I got used to that the kids got used to me.
I wouldn’t scream at the kids (lesson learned from first job) because that makes it worse and their opinion of you deteriorates. Even after teaching for 2 years in the same school the 30 kids I had from the beginning showed a huge lack of respect compared to the new ones because of me screaming at them.
I’ve never had the staff give me the cold shoulder before so that’s pretty weird. Depending on your Japanese level try to strike up small conversations.
My suggestion is to stop trying to be as controlling (what I learned from my new job) and let them establish what type of environment that you are providing them. Sure you need to make sure that they are safe but your plans don’t have to be the same for each class. I have the same type class and level 8 times a week, on top of other levels and types. Despite that I teach all classes differently. You need to change with your kids and make the environment comfortable for them in order for them to want to learn.
Thank you for all the responses! I’ll reply properly at a later point. My fault for not explaining in greater detail, but think raising my Voice and not flying into a fit of rage. I worked for a very different school and the issue at the time was being treated the same as other teachers.
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Sounds like a you problem. As in you are a problem.
Sounds like you’re and ALT who got in too deep. Maybe get some actually teacher training and try again. Learning on the job here doesn’t count as being a real teacher.
You aren’t a teacher
You are an ALT
You assist, you don’t teach.
All of your lesson plans are done for you. Why don’t you just stand there and point at your wrist and say “I’ve already been paid, keep wasting my time, I don’t care either way”.
Maybe you are not suited for teaching? If every place you work, you have a bad reaction from the students, it is a YOU problem.
Sounds like you could use some REAL teacher training, a teaching license, or at least some TESOL courses to teach you how to manage a language class.
“shaking in terror” is not a normal reaction of a student. If the Japanese staff completely ignored you as well, you must have made a terrible impression on them.
It is hard to hear the truth, but what about a career change?