Discuss the state of the teaching industry in Japan with your fellow teachers! Use this thread to discuss salary trends, companies, minor questions that don’t warrant a whole post, and build a rapport with other members of the community.
Please keep discussions civilized. Mods will remove any offending posts.
9 comments
I hate when the Japanese English teachers give unconstructive feedback like, please make your lessons fun, but then shit on you for playing games in class.
I was “hired” by a Interac about two months ago, but haven’t been able to start because they have “no open positions”. Is this legit? I’ve always seen everywhere that getting an ALT job is super easy especially if you already live in the country. I’ve even expanded the area I am willing to work in and still nothing. Is this just an excuse to keep me hanging on or should I look elsewhere? I really don’t understand and I need to get out of my current job.
I always enjoy watching teachers coming back from the middle of their masters doing a 1 or 2 off class for a material design course. Pretty common to see a pretty decent disconnect from material created for a good material design paper and what is actually done in class. The latter tends to mostly geared towards a concept employed for ideal advanced highly motivated learners. Normally heavily over made and over thought out and falls flat. I do not think its a failure of the concepts and mostly just issues of trying to implement such styles in a one or two off class where the students aren’t use to that type of learning.
Does anyone else have English teachers they work with that just don’t speak English?
I’m an ALT at a pretty big high school in Tokyo (about 9 English teachers) and three of our English teachers are just straight up not good. The first one is an old guy who I think wanted to teach other subjects but got delegated to English. I’m sure his understanding is good, but he just seems mentally checked out. He only uses a stereo to play lessons in class and I’m fairly certain he never works with ALTs.
The other two just started. One of them is fresh out of college and studied (or vacationed?) Briefly in the Philippines. When he started I was like “oh cool, what grade/year are you teaching?” And he was like “I’m sorry I don’t understand” and like it took another teacher translating and he still didn’t seem too sure of his schedule. I tried making conversational small talk with him but he is either incredibly shy or just couldn’t understand me.
It just seems like the bar is super low for English teachers, but come on, you can’t tell me what grade/class you’re teaching? I’ve literally had this exact conversation with math and science teachers and they’ve done better than this guy.
Hot Take Discussion of the Month: Grammar Translation served its part historically within the context of language education in Japan. Yet, we still often see it today. Is this a sign of inability to change or is there something else in play?
Anyone got a resource for eiken grammar points? I have books for commonly appearing vocabulary, and I have some books with previous tests in them, but I’d rather not have to comb it all and analyze it for frequently appearing grammar.
In the thread about the guy who lost his job in Korea, there’s a few people saying something like: teaching, you either have it or you don’t. This is weird to me because I know loads of teachers who say they were pretty clueless when they started out. Also, hagwons are notoriously dodgy places to work.
Isnt it a bit off and troll-like to say ‘nah, you’re just bad at teaching’?
Quick question: what is the most difficult grammar point covered in highschool. From what I can tell they mostly rehash things from JHS or cover the little parts that are mostly ignored (such as BE verbs after any modal like, “I will be happy if it rains”.)
Kids at lower level high schools are just more interesting than kids at higher levels one or expensive private ones. They actually have a life outside of clubs and school.