Name: What Teaching English in Japan was REALLY Like
Uploaded: 2020-03-24T11:28:40.000Z
Duration: 16 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

I found this book at the back of my cupboard yesterday.

To-infinitive

It's a book filled with goodbye messages from Japanese students I used to teach.

I got this on my last week as English teacher.

Now I don't want to brag too much, but you'll get a sense of what a great English teacher I was

and the positive impact I had, just by reading out a few of these messages.

'Watch for a body, it will become big!!!!'

This was written, what... four years ago, and I still don't know what that means.

I mean, to me 'VIP de BIG' sounds like a chronically overweight rapper.

But perhaps it is alluding to the fact that at the time I was teaching,

a lot of students and teachers were worried that I was putting on weight, just 'cause my diet was pretty awful.

It does seem to be a recurring theme amongst a few of these messages...

'Thank you for teaching English until now!!'

'It was fun to be able to club together.'

It's important to point out for legal reasons: I didn't go clubbing with underage students,

she is just referring to the after school English club.

And she continues, 'Please be 'stomach' much more healthy in the future!!'

Please be stomach... much more healthy... in the future...

Well, I did heed her words - I'm not yet entirely stomach.

But, it's just nice, y'know, reading through these...

It reminds me of a simpler time. A time when I used to teach English in a room to thousands of students.

And today, given that I've discovered lots of stuff from my past,

I thought I would discuss teaching English in Japan because it's a popularly requested topic,

and I've got a lot of stories and experience from my time, teaching with over 2000 hours of classroom experience, that I can draw upon.

I'm not gonna hold back on my opinions today on the teaching methods, the teachers, the students, the environment -

I'll try and cover it all so you know what you're getting into if you should follow a similar path.

Now I'll be open up-front about the fact that I didn't come to Japan because I was excited about the prospect of teaching English.

Like 80% of people, I came to teach English in Japan because I was excited about the prospect of living in Japan.

In my rare defence, I did take a short course on teaching English as a foreign language at my university,

and my degree was in business and English linguistics.

So, y'know, I can speak really good at English words.

... I- yeah, I know all the most best words that there... that there are-- uhh, that there is.

This bunch of torn and tea-stained documents-- why is there a tea stain on it!?

This is my original JET application - my application for the Japan Exchange Teaching Program,

which I also discovered at the back of my wardrobe.

Now I know the criteria for getting on the JET Program or getting a job teaching English in Japan,

I mean, it's so bad that I even wrote about a holiday that I had in Dubai as an example of culture shock

and how I'd be able to adapt to culture shock in Japan.

'I was culture-shocked by Dubai because it was hot and there's lots of sand.'

That's not even culture! That's just a geographical fact!

And for the section on Japanese language ability, um...

... Yeah, it's just blank. There's nothing there.

Nevertheless, with my wealth of cultural experiences, I got on the JET Program.

I somehow passed the application process and I ended up with the role as an ALT - 'Assistant Language Teacher'.

And I got placed right here, in a beautiful, rural area, where absolutely nobody feels the need to know English.

Now I've heard a lot of people criticize the JET Program over the years,

because they say that that money invested in the foreign teacher could be spent on Japanese teachers -

it could be spent elsewhere in better ways.

But lord knows, they need more foreigners in rural Japan.

I once dated a Japanese girl from that town, and when it came to meeting her mum,

her mum had never met a white person before, despite being 50-something.

So I met her, and she was actually so scared of me that she hid behind her daughter.

She was scared as if I was some sort of rabid dog who would rip her arm off

I wouldn't-- that's not the sort of thing I would do.

To be fair, I did think of going along with it and being like,

'Oh yeah, pleased to meet you--- RaARRggh'

But I didn't do that. 'Cause I'm not mental.

The senior high school where I worked had about 1200 students. It was pretty big.

Within that school, there were about 12 English teachers, and 120 teachers in general.

And I quickly found out when I arrived, that of the dozen teachers that I was gonna work with,

only 8 of them actually spoke English. The others had somehow slipped the net.

And I don't mean they spoke English badly, I mean they just genuinely really struggled to communicate in English

which was quite a surreal situation to be in.

I never held it against them. They were all over 50 years old,

and I suspect when they did apply to teach English the extent of the language test must have just been...

However, one of the things that I'd been taught during my long, tedious induction in Tokyo during the first week

was that you should never correct a teacher in front of the classroom,

lest you undermine them and make them look inferior in front of the class.

So I spent my few first weeks conflicted, dying inside,

because I wasn't sure if stepping in and telling the teacher that they were wrong

would destroy my fragile relationship with my colleagues early on, y'know, which is really important.

So let's do a 10-second pop quiz, and see what you would do.

A: Ignore the situation and carry on, or B: Tell them it's wrong and change it.

Because what's the point of even being there if you're gonna stand in the corner and do nothing?

And y'know what, I found, by correcting them, it never burned any bridges and they were grateful for the input.

The worst classes though weren't with teachers that couldn't speak English,

they were the ones with teachers who just didn't know how to use me in the classroom.

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What Teaching English in Japan was REALLY Like

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