What I actually do

Congrats to THE IMMORTAL RULES winner, Sana!

Last week, I talked about the parts of my job that my employers mandate. But I'm kind of hired for more than that. I'm on the JET programme. It's a Japanese government initiative which hires people into 3 job roles. Apart from your job role, the JET programme also asks participants to "promote grassroot internationalisation."

EIKAWA

Eikawa is the place where internationalisation and teaching naturally meet. It's a Japanese word meaning "English conversation" and is generally used to mean any English class, outside of school, which focuses more on the spoken aspects. My town doesn't require me to teach eikawa, nonetheless, my neighbour started one up in my first year, and it's been going strong ever since.

As our eikawa is so informal, it really provides a chance to learn more than English. We - the town's 3 ALTs from 3 countries and the Japanese adult students -  get to exchange ideas. We present about our cultures, and show bits of it. Best of all, we get to know one another. For my first 2 years, most of my Japanese friends in town were from eikawa. Our interactions outside the classroom did a lot for my understanding of Japanese culture, and their understanding of mine.

 FORMAL ACTIVITIES

There are a million and one formal ways to internationalise. The simplest and easiest is to present on your culture in the classes you're already teaching. At elementary school, I'm pretty free and flexible. So once I get ahead in the text book, I occasionally include a lesson with Bajan culture. I do Halloween and Christmas lessons. I tell the kids about the rest of the world.

And there are formal activities outside the classroom as well. The various international organisations in my prefecture put on various events. So far, I've done a general presentation on Barbadian culture, and a cooking class with Barbadian food. (I also did cooking classes with the eikawa.) And there's a big international fair every year. I've hosted a booth there, basically just telling people where Barbados was, and a few facts, and listening to Bajan music.

YOU SEE ME, THEREFORE I AM

Why would something like internationalisation even be important enough to mention right next to your official job role? To understand, you have to think of the Japanese position. Japan is an archipelago off the coast of Asia. They spent hundreds of years at war with their neighbours. They purposely shut themselves off from the rest of the world at times. And they are the only country with Japanese as their first language.

All of those things combine to equal a simple fact. Japan sees only Japan. Unlike the rest of us, who see and understand the rest of world, Japanese people can (and often do) forget there is a rest of the world. And many of them have no idea what that rest of the world is like.

I am a fountain of information. People can find out that Coca Cola exists outside Japan (yes, I've been asked), that the word "bye-bye" did not originate in Japanese, that black people have different hair from Japanese people.


My mere existence here is a reminder of the world, of the Caribbean, of Black people, of English-speakers. I think I do most of my internationalisation when random people talk to me on the streets of my town, or on the bus, or the train, or even with the new teachers at school. Especially being from Barbados.

There are a couple THOUSAND Japanese people that only know that Barbados exists because of me. Last week, I was at a PTA drinking party (um, that sounds so horrible- Japanese culture does not translate simply), and the lady next to me was the Mom of a Junior High student I'd been teaching since she was 8. She told me her daughter loved English and that she'd come home and told her the English teacher was from Barbados and she actually looked it up!

My being here also translates into people trying with English. My students will often scream "Hello" at me from across parking lots. Some of my spunkier JHS students will think up random comments. "My name is legend. I am dangerous," and "You have Canada face" to a Canadian ALT. Sometimes I run into random students from other schools, towns, etc, and they'll try their hand at having a conversation. And random adults will as well. Sometimes they will say strange things. Very, very strange things. Like the urologist who said, "I penis doctor. Penis turn black, fall off? Call me." (Ah, sweet memories!) All these people try because they see me.

WRAP IT UP
My VISA says "INSTRUCTOR" and my town technically pays me to teach. But there are days when I teach nothing at all. And even when I am teaching, it's not earth-shattering. I've already mentioned that elementary school and kindergarden English aren't really meant to "teach" so much as to make kids receptive to English/foreign languages. And so, I often feel like the more important job is the one that is less measurable, the one that doesn't have a start and end time. The one I do all day long merely by being.

What they think I do

Has anyone seen that meme? You know the one: What society thinks I do, What my mom thinks I do, What my friends think I do, etc? Well, I allude to my job pretty often on here, but  it occurs to me, that I don't really talk about what I do. So here goes. This is the first of two parts: today, I'll be talking about the teaching.

JET

I came to Japan on the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme -JET. JET is a government-organised programme. It recruits foreigners through Japanese embassies around the world to come here as ALTs, CIRs and SEAs. CIRs are Coordinators for International Relations. They work in International departments of city offices. SEAs are Sports Exchange Advisors. They're accomplished in a Sport and come to Japan as coaches.

My job title is Assistant Language Teacher (ALT).There are a lot of reasons for the word "Assistant" in the title. In Japan, the word "teacher" is a funny thing. "Sensei" is used as a term of respect, and the kanji technically say "ahead of student," but the term has a connotation of having sat an exam. In my country (backbush) area, the word Sensei gets thrown around like it's a ventriloquist's voice. But in some places people get nitpicky. Technically, if you haven't sat the Japanese exam, you're not a "sensei," your a "kyoushi" (instructor). Additionally, I've heard you're technically not allowed to be left alone with a class if you haven't passed your teacher's exam.

JUNIOR HIGH

The word Assistant also reflects the format that the job most often takes: team teaching. In my particular junior high school (JHS), team teaching isn't restricted to foreign languages. Maths and Japanese and Science will often be team taught. Outside of foreign languages, team-teaching is basically one teacher standing at the front teaching, and the other teacher acting as support, helping students who need a little extra time, etc. In the case of foreign languages, it generally means that the Japanese Teacher of English/Language (JTE/L) teaches grammar and the ALT is generally responsible for pronunciation, and the occasional game.

In my first 3 years, I worked with two JTEs, one of whom had me do warm up games almost every game, and for the rest of class, I did support, or pronunciation, depending on what the lesson was concentrating on. I usually went to every class he had. The other JTE didn't take me to class as much. She had a really good grasp of English and pronunciation, and she did most of it herself.

They transfer teachers here every year, and last April I was shaken when they switched both of my JTEs at the same time. I almost cried. Seriously. But it turned out to be a blessing. As they were both new to me, and the school, there was no "precedence" for anything, so we wrote a whole new script. This past year, instead of going to all the classes with my main JTE, I go to about half of them. But instead of a 5 minute warm up game, I often have a 20 minute game or the whole session to myself. It's probably a little less time withthe kids, but I'm probably causing a bigger affect with English learning.

ELEMENTARY

Elementary school is a grab bag. At my main school, "the big school," I have never team-taught. Not  even when I first came and only knew enough Japanese to ask where the toilet was. (You'd be surprised how well you can communicate without the use of actual language. Mime is a brilliant invention!) The teachers are always in the classroom with me, but I guess they got spoiled by the ALT before me. He did all his classes by himself, too. Even when they started using a "textbook" (there really isn't much text in it), and the guidebook was ENTIRELY in Japanese, I still had to do it on my own. That guidebook is half the reason I'm semi-literate. lol. At tiny school (less than 30 kids, yes, the whole school), the 5/6 joint class teacher sometimes takes the lead, and sometimes she asks me to.

The actual class content, is mostly vocab based around a topic, and games. The objective is not grammatical correctness, but concept and to open the kids' minds to the foreign world and learning English (and/or other foreign languages) in the future. At elementary school I spend a surprising amount of time cutting up paper and card, drawing anime characters, making Bingo sheets... Just today, I wrote(/drew) "Hello" in 9 languages, including 5 which don't use Roman script. Don't ask me when I'll need to write I'll ever need to write Hello in Cyrillic, or Devanagari or Hangul, but having written each about 10 times, I now know how to! ( Need to find a reason to put this is my resume.)

Actually, now that I'm mainly responsible for innovative ways of getting the kids to use English in JHS as well, I spend an inordinate amount of time there drawing scenes for the kids to hide rabbits in, and compiling reports about Valentine's Day around the world.

KINDERGARDEN

"Teaching" kindergarden is some of the most fun I have at work. Essentially, we (all 3 town ALTs together) teach the kids a vocab set, like colours or animals, invent a game for us to play, and essentially just spend the entire time running around. It's FAB! Oh, and in Japan, there's a Hello Song. I don't know where it came from, but it seems to be coast to coast, and all English learners seem to know it. We got bored and remixed that Sound of Music song into The Goodbye Song, actions and all. The kiddles and teachers all think it's like a legit song, not something we half-stole from Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Sound of Music - So Long...  Farewell


That's all the stuff that I'm scheduled for by the Board of Education of my town - my employers. Come back next week to find out what I actually do. (Of course I do all this stuff, as well. Obvsie Bovsie.)