One of my teachers at a school I teach at was mentioning to me that in 2 or so years, after school clubs are getting the axe and teachers are gonna be going home a lot earlier, like at 5pm or so. Is this true? She made it sound like an upcoming across-the-board law change that had already been decided.
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There is a general push to transition the oversight of clubs from teachers to community organizations in line with ministry guidance. How this is happening in practice varies enormously by municipality / location.
But yes, one reason for the shift is the address the accute teacher shortage by attempting to reduce the obscene hours many teachers (particularly JHS teachers) are working.
My school is trying to reduce overtime so the easiest thing to cut is clubs. However, both students and the supervising teachers want to do it and always have…they just have to be paid for it now so the bosses want to stop it. The teachers are still overworked but get paid loads more now and feel like they had clubs when they were at school and want to pass it on. Personally I do mine once a week and avoid overtime unless it’s necessary.
I hope so.
I work with a lot of Jr High kids who are just so tired all the time. They are so burnt out.
Same with the teachers. People need to spend more time at home or with their friends.
The teacher shortage calls for “drastic action,” and this is one of their solutions.
Japan is slowly but surely coming to the realization that not everyone wants to work for 12 hours per day.
My schools have clubs 5x per week, one of which is Saturday. It’s too much! When I was teaching in the UK, clubs were once a week plus tournament matches. Any weekend hours could be reclaimed another time, but that was unusual.
Another alternative would be to pay a coach to come in and teach those sessions. The hours are too long for the kids as well, though.
The first-year teachers who work all day and then give up their weekends to do club activities would love that. But I doubt it….
What they are doing where I live is
Teachers don’t have to go to clubs if they don’t want to, which at first, meant nothing, but now the majority of teachers don’t, or they only stop by for 5-10 minutes, but we still have clubs
And one day a week there is no club
I feel sorry for the students if club activities are abolished. There are so many students who look forward to club activities. However, I think they should be outsourced to private companies to eliminate the burden on teachers.
There will still be clubs, but now they will be trending away from teachers doing the bulk of the coaching and instead the 地域 will be taking over, i.e. outside coaches from the community.
Sounds like they actually are trying to implement an idea that makes total sense.
Dated a woman working in the public school system once. She never had time to do anything.
Every weekend she had to go and take care of the kids playing table tennis. Like, what the hell.
Oh wow, that kind of sucks… One of the things I’ve always liked as an adolescent was how cool clubs were in Japan compared with my country (Spain), which where… pretty much non-existant.
As a private school teacher, I’m pretty bummed out. Public schools are transitioning to clubs being run by outside hires while a school like mine is relishing picking up all the kids and families that want more of the same. It’s going to be one of our “selling points”…blegh.
Hopefully. It’s an absolute farce, basically compulsory daycare that makes teachers’ hourly wage dreadful and gives them 1 or zero free days a week.
Good. Maybe they can now start focusing on academics instead of passing everyone with a pulse.
Its coming. I work at a public school and our clubs are max 3x/week and no later than 5:30pm, with no morning practice. And no it isn’t elementary school.
Still not good enough given that public school teacher hours in the district end at 4:50, so that’s only 2 hours of mandated unpaid labor per week, but its heading in the right direction.
I was in the school orchestra. The teachers had to stay at school until at least 7PM, worked seven days a week, AND bought instruments (some over 1M) with their own money. It was almost like we were their hobbies because they had no life. It’s long overdue but I’m glad if it’s true.
Hope so! I know there is restructuring going on for removing the burden of club activities from the teachers and handing responsibility to the local authorities instead. If the whole lot can be reduced a bit, that will be good for everyone’s health and wellbeing I think.
Is it confirmed?
Local junior high school stopped forcing bukatsu to students this year.
I have 2 kids go to that junior high. One went to the relax nobody cares club and watch ok. One went to the sports club because he thought that sport was fun, and they made every effort to make him regret thinking sport could be fun (training at 6am in summer vacation!!, bullying, …)
Bukatsu can die for all I care. Never had any issues during elementary and they were going to private organizations. It wasn’t more expensive either because they didn’t have to buy expensive bukatsu gear (so expensive I thought the teacher must be getting kickbacks from the clothes store they were choosing)
Hang on, I’m super confused: are the clubs like baseball, soccer & music not just run after school for an hour or so by the respective sports & music teachers, or do regular teachers get forced into taking them even if they know anything about them?
I guess the teachers can finally join us for some post-club drinks now.
I’m all for it. They can fit club hours within traditional school hours. They also should axe saturday classes.
Ah, this sounds familiar. When I was a youth, all the teachers in my province went on strike just as I started high school. As a result, we didn’t have clubs in high school. By the 3rd or 4th year, some sports teams were back because small white trash town gotta sport right? But it wasn’t until the 5th year that teachers were willing to oversee clubs again. Definitely missed out on a lot because the government was unwilling to treat teachers like human beings and parents were unwillingly to volunteer or find other solutions to make clubs possible. 20+ years and a different country, same story.
Not to be an “America/the west has all the answers” guy here, but having seasons for sports would also be a great step. I get that some kids and teachers actually do want to practice daily and go really hard to win games or whatever, but if it were just a few months out of the year like we do with football, baseball etc. and they’re off the rest of the year, I think that would be a nice step.
Edit: I’ve since learned that at least where I live, high school baseball does have a season, but it’s March-November, so most of the year…I’m not a sports guy so I don’t know if that’s normal or not
So I work in a very rural town in a more rural prefecture and I work at a JHS. Over the past two years I have already seen slow changes regarding club activities after school. We use to have them Tuesday through Saturday, but then they stopped having club activities on Wednesdays to let the teachers leave earlier and now I am hearing they may also no longer do club activities on Saturdays. So it looks as though at least at our JHS we are slowly moving in that direction.
I noticed since April this year 1st period in all my schools start much earlier, home time is earlier and clubs are being run some afternoons instead of having a 6th period. We also have these laminated signs on the board every day like 退庁 17:30, 18:00 etc to get people out. I’ve been hearing this school club talk for about 6 years now though. Is this actually changing over some law?
I heard the graduate teacher numbers in every prefecture was plummeting as well. Depopulation and the job having an awful rep. Will take some work to make it an attractive position again.
I hope so, my work hours are from 8-8 usually and 6 days a week.
I’d love a break for once haha. But then again, knowing how Japan runs, I really do doubt that they will…
I wonder how this will sit with my kid’s club coach who is teaching just so he can coach.
They’ve already started implementing small changes at my school, no club activities on Mondays or Thursdays, but they’re still on weekends. A lot of my co-workers don’t leave work until about 9 or 10pm. They had class reports to write recently and the principal told one coworker (I don’t know if it was for everyone) he wanted a different format on the Friday before the Monday deadline. Apparently this principal can be a bit of a hard-ass, very critical and no praise or encouragement, old-school type.
I’m an ALT, I get to flounce out around 4pm and have none of the extracurricular responsibilities. I arrive at 8am, most of the staff are already in the building by that time, typically around 7:30 I think.
I think gradually the club activity hours are being reduced on the days that are scheduled, then next year weekends free if I heard correctly.
It blows my mind that when the students do tests, they’re marked immediately and returned the following day, my colleagues have 130-150 papers to check, I have succeeded in getting them to let me help them, especially when I’m sitting at my desk twiddling my thumbs. Where I’m from, it’s a minimum of 2 weeks.
Private school teacher here. We actually had a committee meeting about this issue yesterday. Despite one of the topics on the agenda being ‘How to reduce the burden on teachers’, any discussion of reducing club hours, asking the students what they think or reducing participation in tournaments at weekends was clearly taboo and the only solution suggested was to force more teachers to look after clubs.
My principal cut after school activity times in half a couple of years ago, now from 4 to 5 instead of 4 to about 6. However, other schools in the area are still going until 6 and it seemed like a “just him” decision and not that of the city.