New School Year Part 1

This is going to be a multiple entry blog about the new school year, my teachers, and other fun stuff. The first blog isn't going to be much fun because it'll just be me whining about the Japanese school system. Sorry!

Before I start into the specifics of my schools, my teachers, and my students, I think I’ll take a brief moment to detail the Japanese school system, which is really messed up. The way the school system works here in Japan is weird. School runs from April through March, with a 2 week break usually falling at the end of March/beginning of April. I’m fine with that part. That way, students get a break (in theory, but this is Japan, so they still come to school every day for sports and club activities), and teachers have time to chill, write report cards, etc. And in Japan the teachers do take the first week to write final reports for the year, etc. The problem I have with this school system is what occurs at the end of the first week and all through the second week.

At the end of the first week, the teachers find out if they are being transferred. That then leaves them only 1 week to go to a new school, meet the new staff, and create a whole new set of lesson plans for the school year. It’s crazy. Just because they taught the 2nd year students using one brand of textbooks one year doesn’t mean they’ll teach the same grade and from the same textbooks the next year. I had a teacher who taught using the New Horizon textbooks to 2nd year students in a neighboring city; the next year, she was transferred to my city and had 1 week to familiarize herself with the Sunshine textbooks that my city uses and with the 3rd year level of English. How do schools systems think that 1 week is enough time to plan your entire curriculum for the year? That’s barely enough time to figure out where the bathrooms are in your school, let alone to design a whole years-worth of lessons, games, etc. No wonder there’s not a lot of change in Japan – there’s no TIME to implement change. And now imagine the situation of my poor BOE guy, who not only had to do all of this, but he had to couple it with moving to a new city, learning how to cook dinners for himself alone, saying goodbye to his family, etc. Utter, utter crap.

Teachers change schools about every 3-8 years, with the average being about 5 years at any given school. They have no say in what school they go to, or even where in the prefecture they go (though they can make requests). It’s not unheard of for teachers to get moved to schools upwards of 2 or 3 hours away. Many teachers in these situations must rent an apartment in the city they teach in, live there alone for 4 days a week, then go back to live with their family on the weekend. One of my favorite BOE members was just transferred. He was really nice, spoke really good English despite not having studied it for several years, and he really adored his family. But, at the whim of the higher ups, he was transferred this year to a school 2 hours away. So now he has to live alone for most of the week, and he can only see his family on the weekends. This situation could last upwards of 3-5 years. How much does that suck?

Anyway, back to teachers. New teachers usually only stay a year or two at their first few school because the BOE wants them to get a feel for a few different schools. There are also contract teachers, who have studied their subject area and went through teachers' training, but didn’t manage to pass the final exam (which is really hard because in Japan, they only accept a certain amount of new teachers a year. So you could be a really, really great teacher and really good in your subject area, but if they already accepted 3 new teachers and the quota was 3, then sorry, but you don’t get your teaching license). These contract teachers usually only stay 1 year at any give school, though it’s not unheard of for them to stay 2.

So that’s a quick overview of the crappy, crappy system here. Next post will have a little more humor, I hope. This one was just complaining. Sorry.