For the past two years, I have been doing extra English lessons every Sunday night at one of my student's houses. The pay was small, but the kids were few, the preparation time nil, and I was happy to get some experience teaching material outside of my normal classes.
Then things started to change. First, my own schedule got too busy that I had to push the class to Monday night. This caused some kids to drop out only to be replaced with new kids. This may not seem like a big deal at first, but when you are teaching one group of kids for a year, then all of a sudden you have a couple new kids who are basically 'a year behind', that means my planning time increases while my pay stays the same. Also, the oldest girl became a junior high student, and I felt it was my duty to bump up her level to focus on passing the Eiken, an English standardized test here in Japan. So not only did my planning time increase, but I increased the class time from an hour to 1.5 hours.
This bothered me a bit, but then Yamakawa-san started cooking me awesome dinners to take home every week, so I began to feel the extra work was worth it.
Then this past May happened. After being settled in this routine for about 6 months, I had two girls quit, and four new kids show up. My class demographic became the following:
1 8th grader who can read
1 8th grader who can't read
1 5th grader who had been in my class for two years
2 5th graders who knew no ABCs and hardly any English outside of 'Hello'
1 4th grader who knew no ABCs and hardly any English outside of 'Hello'
1 3rd grader who had been in my class for two years
1 3rd grader who had been in my class for 6 months and a little behind
1 3rd grader who knew no ABCs and didn't want to be there
My prep time, which use to be nothing, all of a sudden became 1-2 hours of extra work to print out worksheets and the like for all the different levels. Also, the class became rowdier since I was repeating material for the new kids, and the older kids got bored. I was unable to control them using the same discipline rules I use in my classroom (such as screaming, 'Shut up!', while performing a piledriver) since I was inside someone's house.
And most importantly, I had no change in pay.
So, I quit. And yesterday was my last class. Hooray!
Putting the 大 in 大宜味.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Labels: English school
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5 comments:
That's sad.
You are teaching English but also guiding these kids to the new world.
These kids are growing in isolated countyside of Japan.
Through teaching English, you can open up these kids' mind something they have never seen before but you faild it.
That's a sad story.
Failed? That's a pretty harsh judgment. And seeing as it's said anonymously, it's cowardly, too.
H.C. put a lot of time into this class and in the end, it just got out of control. Too bad the people asking him to run the class didn't realize that he was being stretched beyond a reasonable capacity. Ultimately, there is no one to blame. All things end.
I have to agree with Son of Higashi. Cliff is guiding these kids into a new world, but he is doing that through the job which he is paid to do eight hours every day. This extra job - which was taken out of his own time - got to be too much and it's not fair to expect him to dedicate all waking hours to teaching English to kids. It sounds like Cliff made the right decision: to value his own time over what was becoming a time sink with little recognizable results.
Hey Anonymous,
You must not be a teacher.
I teach most of these kids at school once a week already. Their English is awesome. Way better than Son of Higashi's and Dave's students (bam!).
Also, 3 nights a week, I do karate with most of these kids. That's 4 days a week that their minds are blown by my presence. This class was just extra, and I hated doing it. Please respect that.
I listed many reasons why the class became difficult to do, so I stopped. It's not a sad story, but a happy one.
Anyway ALT are forbidden to take paid work outside of JET programme duties.
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