In Japan, every April there is a big shuffle of teachers. Unlike the US, teachers in Japan usually only work at a school for 2-6 years before getting swapped to a new school either within the city or within the prefecture, depending on their position. The reasoning behind this is to keep the job interesting and to spread around the skills of the teachers. This sounds reasonable enough. Now, here comes the not so reasonable part: teachers don't get a choice of when they switch schools or where they switch to. To make it even worse, they usually only get a two week warning, with official results coming out even later. This is insane to me. It seems that the teachers usually get a bit more of a warning than the official results, but some teachers do legitimately find out 2 weeks before the new school year if their commute is about to go from 10 minutes to an hour and 10 minutes.
For example, I work with six English teachers, each of them with drastically different teaching styles. I found out less than two weeks before the new school year that both my main teachers are transferring. This means my work environment is about to shift drastically. A famous saying in the JET and ALT community at large is "every situation is different," or ESID for short (so many acronyms in one sentence). ALTs report everything from a teacher completely ignoring their existence to leaving the ALT alone in class to teach. My work tends to fall on the human tape recorder end of things, which is manageable, but some days are a bit painful. I understand I'm not a real teacher and don't have any formal training for how to teach English, but being expected to simply stand there and do/say things on command with no input from myself feels somewhat dehumanizing. I remember one day a couple months into my time as an ALT I attended an online conference with my main English teacher. The conference was two days and mostly in English, so the English teacher was struggling to understand all the English and fell asleep in the afternoon both days. On the second day after waking up she looked at me in shock and said "wait, this is what you do every day?"(in reference to trying to work in an environment that is not your native language or culture). In that moment I became a lot more human to her. Not just a thing that makes activities and speaks English on command, but a person who is struggling every day to try to understand the world around them. Now she is transferring to a different school and I must hope the new English teacher sees the humanity in me too.
For the JET program, our contract runs August to July and the due date for renewing your contract is January. You may recontact because you like your current work environment, but come April it could change completely and not be nearly as enjoyable. You can break contract of course but generally speaking it kind of sucks for future planning to have your working environment change drastically with little to no warning or control. Many ALTs in rural areas work at multiple schools, myself included. At one school, I communicate almost exclusively in English due to the English teachers having a high level of English and some other teachers also having a high level of English. At the other school, I communicate almost entirely in Japanese because only the English teacher speaks English and they are so busy there isn't time for me to talk to them. This second situation is of course fantastic for my Japanese learning, as it is near full immersion, but it becomes lonely. I can only understand so much Japanese and other teachers are busy, so I spend many hours studying Japanese or otherwise trying to entertain myself. The best way I can describe this is "my world becomes silent." Like there are still people around and things happening, but it is difficult to interact with them, so I become somewhat cut off from the world around me and am limited to my own mind.
Despite the difficulty interacting with my coworkers, I still feel very lucky to have the coworkers I do. Generally, Japanese people are a little afraid of foreigners due to their lack of language ability and it's something I notice a lot when we get new teachers. They are very hesitant to talk to me and will ask the English teacher to ask me questions. Luckily for me, I came to Japan with low level Japanese conversational skills and the vice principal took great interest in asking me questions. Due to his general positive opinion of me, other teachers followed suit. My coworkers are comfortable talking to me and have a general idea of what level of Japanese I understand, which makes work life much better. I also have a handful of coworkers with children my age, and they are especially nice to me. Multiple teachers do switch out every year, but enough teachers with a positive opinion of me remain to influence the new teachers. Last year we got a new vice principal and he was trying to tell me something about summer break in somewhat broken English. Another teacher was watching this all happen and eventually started laughing and told him "she understands Japanese you know" at which point he switched to Japanese and things were much smoother.
The new school year starts in April and classes resume on the 10th, so until then I will be floating around the teacher's office trying to keep myself busy. Today my coworkers were watching baseball on the TV and gave me candy when I walked over to check it out XD. Hopefully meeting the new English teachers goes well.
Comments