JET LITERATURE
The word "teaching" is all over the official literature of the
JET progam. the T in AET, JET, and ALT all stand for teacher.
But the reality is that few really do anything remotely resembling
what is traditionally thought of as teaching. Let me say that
I have some training in TEFL, and had many years of experience
on all levels teaching English in America, and overseas in Japan
(Tokyo, before) Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand and Cambodia. This
can come as quite a shock, especially for those who assumed they
would be gaining experience in the field of teaching, and for
those who have had past experience as teachers.
ORIENTATION
The foreshadowing of this reality of the JET program occured
during orientation in Tokyo, and in the provincial orientation.
All the lectures and speeches concerned how to get along with
your Japanese coworkers, how to avoid culture shock, and what
to do if you become suicidal. Little if any guidance on how to
teach english as a foreign language was given. An episode during
my provincial orientation in Kyoto was revealing. We were taken
to an English bookstore and shown the floor containing English
books. We were recommeded to buy books on learning Japanese and
English/Japanese dictionaries, if we didn't already have them.
I wandered a few aisles over to the TEFL book section, to have
a look at English teaching books. The Japanese authority in charge
of our little outing came over and told me that I "had better"
return to the group and select a text on learning Japanese. This
was my first "had better", a phrase I was to learn was popular
with authority figures when speaking to inferiors. He told me
that I would learn how to teach English from the Japanese teachers
of English (JTEs) at my assigned school. There was no need to
waste time looking at these TEFL books, he said. Learning Japanese
was of the utmost importance. At this point, just a week into
the JET program, I was already beginning to have serious doubts
on what I had gotten myself into. The only teaching seemed to
be the T in the title of the program.
TEACHING:THE LOGISTICS
The next shock for AETs is planning a lesson from an English
book. You are given a book on how to learn English, written almost
entirely in Japanese. The few phrases in English scattered across
the pages are mostly laughably outdated, meaningless, irrelevant
to the students' lives, or grammatically incorrect. All the books
are written by Japanese, the logic being that only Japanese know
how to teach other Japanese. You are charged with meeting the
Japanese teacher (JTE) of this class and co-planning a class for
an hour. Some JTEs will tell you to do everything, perhaps the
JTE won't even accompany you to class. Other JTEs want a scripted
class so every minute is planned in advance, with teaching done
in tandem. Officially, the JTE must be in the classroom with you.
This is a Japanese law. This law was written to keep ethnic Koreans
away from the teaching profession, otherwise students would not
grow up to be a perfect Japanese citizen. Japanese think that
if a student hears Japanese with an accent or pronounced wrong,
the student will never learn true Japanese.
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