Being an ALT in Japan

I’ve realized that many of my friends and family members find it difficult to understand the details of my work in Japan; not so much the concrete details of the situation, which are easy enough to explain if taken at face value, but rather the forces behind my situation. That of course makes perfect sense, since Japan’s inscrutability lies not in the ripples and eddies on the surface, but it stops the explorer in his tracks when the source of those surface stirrings are sought.
My job title is “Assistant Language Teacher,” or ALT. The first word is the most important thing to understand when asking “how’s teaching in Japan?” In the sense that I taught English in Prague for several years, in my own classroom with my own students where my prerogative was never once obstructed, I don’t actually “teach” here. My job is to “assist” the Japanese English teachers. That role, of course, is wide open for interpretation.
ALTs never know what to expect until the first week of classes, it all depends on how the Japanese English Teacher (JTE) wants to use them. Some are unceremoniously thrown into class and basically charged with planning and teaching everything, which the JTE sits in the back of the class and watches. Other ALTs are never asked to do anything, and basically become a “walking tape-player,” asked to read a vocabulary list for pronunciation practice at the beginning of each class, then left to stand in a corner of the front of class while the JTE teaches in Japanese. These are the extremes, and the particulars can fall anywhere in the middle. Many ALTs work at more than one school over the course of the week, so work at each school can be radically different depending on the JTE they’re working with at the moment.
I work primarily (four days a week) at one rural Jr. High school, with about 100 students and 13 teachers. On the ALT-responsibility scale my role leans heavily towards the “walking tape-player” side. I read vocabulary lists and sentences which the students repeat, ask them questions, and sometimes administer a (usually predetermined) game like hangman or pictionary. In the Jr. High I have no lesson planning, no responsibility, and never deliver new material unless I accidentally stumble upon a word the students don’t know (which the JTE promptly translates and the students promptly forget).
I should note here that my weekly visits to Elementary schools are the complete opposite, where I have almost complete control over the lesson subject and delivery, and communicating with the students is basically on my shoulders since the teachers often understand no more than the students (many pictures and hand-motions come into play). For many ALTs, Elementary schools are what keep us from turning into office vegetables. But most of the work week is spent standing in a corner of class or sitting in the office, left largely to our own devices (as is the case as I write this).
This is pretty straightforward, but the headache begins when you try to understand why this situation exists. The JET program, which is the government-sponsored primary supplier of ALTs to public schools, has existed for over 20 years, and was founded to increase the population’s English-speaking ability and comfort-level with foreigners. From rather humble beginnings the program in 2007 administered 5,119 foreign ALTs from 41 countries scattered from one tip of Japan to the other. The salaries alone costs the (local) government well over an annual $150,000,000 a year, not including the paid-for round-trip flight, hotel stays, conferences, and administrative salaries and expenses, which doubtlessly add tens of millions. It all looks very grand, which might actually be the most important thing.
On the ground-level, however, the picture is very different, and often consists of a foreigner sitting in an office chair with nothing to do for hours on end. I have an average of 2.5 hours of class time (much of which is spent standing quietly by) in a 9 hour work day, and in the current 3-week period (graduation time) I am paid (as it works out to be) $17.60 an hour, for 90 hours in the school, with a grand total of 6.75 hours in class. Clearly, there must be something going on here.
And this is where the fun begins. As always, the first thing to do is to follow the money. The most important thing to understand is that the schools where the ALT works do not hire the ALT. The choice to hire an ALT comes from the local Board of Education (BOE), which is the local office that coordinates all the schools in the area. So the decision to bring in the ALT is not made by the people who will be working and making use of him or her, but by a third party. So the hiring is not based on need, but on (ideally) perceived need, or (more probably) on the notion that it would be cool to have a foreigner in the school. Thus the (implied) conversation, in my mind, often goes something like this:
BOE: “Look, we got you a foreigner! Isn’t that cool?”
Teachers: “Great! What do we do with him?”
BOE: “He’ll assist you however you want! Have fun!”
Teachers, quietly (very quietly) to themselves: “Now what?”
The fact is that the schools don’t need the ALTs, not in the strictest sense. And in most cases the Japanese teachers have no idea how to use them, while the ALTs have no idea how they ought to be used. These teachers have been teaching the same curriculum and the same lessons for years, and to fully incorporate a “team-teacher” as an equal member of class (if they are even interested in such a notion) would entail a complete restructuring of the material with the ALT from square one. And this restructuring would have to be repeated with each new ALT, which can change every 1-3 years. A few teachers actually do it, but most (understandably) just don’t have the time, interest, or energy.
What are some other reasons that a capable English teach gets turned into a highly paid tape-player?
To be fair I should note that my situation might be conductive to more friction than usual, because I’ve already worked as a teacher, and I know how to plan lessons, explain grammar, target specific vocabulary with fun activities, etc. Many ALTs come straight from college with very little understanding of English when looking at it as a foreign language. The JTEs know this, or realize it pretty quickly, and learn to give the ALT no more than he can handle.
I’m also very aware that my JTEs are uncomfortable with asking me to do any work, as ridiculous as that sounds. I’ll avoid going deeply into Japanese mentality, but the general rule is that you don’t cause inconvenience for anyone unless they are clearly lower on the totem-pole. The hierarchy is absolute, and everyone knows where they stand. But throw in a foreign, male, young, experienced teacher such as myself, and the Japanese are totally at sea. So even though I’ve often verbally expressed my eagerness to do anything that will help them, have made no secret (non-verbally) of being pretty darn bored, and have cheerfully accepted every request no matter how last-minute or mundane, they still have no idea how to approach me without the hierarchy to guide them. The smallest request of preparing a game of hangman or reading an article comes with more nervous smiles and apologies then I can shake a stick at.
And really, there’s not a lot more they could ask of me without going far out of their way, so in some ways my forcing them to let me help them more would be rather selfish, truthfully more to appease my boredom than to make work easier for them. The Japanese system of English teaching hasn’t changed with the presence of thousands of foreigners, and the textbook must still be taught page by page, the exams must be prepared for question by question, and the students must be shielded from the discomfort of what they don’t understand (until the textbook says they’re ready). Any deviation from this course risks students not making it farther in the system, to the right High School and right University. For a foreigner who can’t speak Japanese, there’s not really a legitimate place in this system, and the Japanese teachers probably (subconsciously at least) know this as well as anyone, and certainly better than the “higher-ups” who have spent billions of dollars over the years to import these foreigners. The Japanese bureaucracy seems especially susceptible to this universally governmental way of thinking, which I liken to noticing a loose screw in the table across the room and therefore throwing screw-drivers at it until something sticks. With regards to the JET program, nothing has stuck. Without going deeply into it (this could be the topic of an article in itself), both statistically and anecdotally there has been no large-scale change in English fluency or comfort with foreigners.
However, as I sit at my desk trying to fill the time, feeling like a parasite on the system and quietly frustrated that I was invited to the other side of the world and then given nothing to do, the most frightening realizations come when I look at myself from the perspective of the busy teachers around me. I’ve heard that when Japanese employees are introduced to a new office job, they are often given no training or specific duties, and they are not told what to do (a product, from the perspective of his colleagues, of the “do what you should, inconvenience no one” motto). A new employee might spend the first month sitting at his desk, just observing and trying to figure out what he should do, then slowly finding a use for himself and adapting to the new job. This is alarming because while I sit here frustrated about not being given any work, those around me might be frustrated that after 7 months here I haven’t found any work.
For a few weeks I tried to operate under this assumption, but speaking almost no Japanese means that I rarely know what’s going on around me, and also usually couldn’t help with it anyway (as far as the preparation, teaching, and paper-work goes). And again, the school is well-staffed before the ALT arrives; there are no obvious niches left unfilled. So I began to make a point of asking my JTEs if there was anything I could do to help them. It became very clear that since I had asked (perhaps suggesting too clearly that I was bored), they felt obligated to find something for me to do. After a few weeks of making cross-word puzzles that never got used and other blatant busy-work, I stopped asking.
One reason the teachers might be so hesitant to give responsibility over to an ALT (besides the obvious reasons) is the feeling that they are shirking their duties if they allow a foreigner to take too much of their work. The work-ethic here is very much about keeping up appearances, and allowing a newcomer to do too much of your work might be seen as laziness. This is why I’m so surprised to hear about ALTs who have the opposite problem, getting no support from their JTE and basically being given all the JTE’s work. This might be the result of a different problem, that many Japanese English teachers can’t actually speak English. They can teach the textbook because they’ve basically memorized it, and perhaps even teach it well, but – as is the case with one of my JTEs – when it comes to practical competence with English it’s a real struggle to have even the simplest conversation. By way of example, I once asked my JTE “is this the last week of school?” “Yes yes,” he nodded agreeably. An hour later he came to me and said “Sorry, I not understand. This not last week.” This is not uncommon, and these teachers are painfully aware of the absurdity of their situation. Being a face-conscious society, I’m assuming that many teachers would rather take the risk of criticism by having the ALT teach their classes completely than risk the ridicule they fear by exposing their English in front of a native English speaker. In any case, changing, breaking into, fitting into, or even communicating with the system looked like a brick wall.
I then turned to the students, since they are why I’m here anyway, in principle. I tried to mix with them and communicate with them in their short breaks between classes. This has not been a complete failure, though it still consists primarily of the wilder boys grouping around me and shouting “Hey! Hey! Hey!” and the girls giggling and shying away. Because of the firm adherence to text-book teaching, even students who can read basic English can’t say or make out the simplest sentences (and if it’s a sentence that deviates remotely from the form in which it appears in the text book, then forget it). And really, they are young teenagers in a very remote village of a few thousand people in the middle of an island. English is associated with the wide world far outside the reach of their experience, a world that hasn’t quite become real to them and certainly has manifested no real connection with their lives. To them, as to Japan generally, I am a source of interest and uncertainty, balancing each other to create a boundary above and beyond the language barrier.
The one success I have managed was to stop waiting for interest, and began giving written messages to students that I thought might be interested in communication, asking them questions about their life and interests. A few wrote back, and one especially has enthusiastically entered into a weekly correspondence of sorts, inspiring him to buy an English-Japanese dictionary and do English research online. Well, one student out of a hundred isn’t exactly heartening, but it’s a success nonetheless.
As far as classes go nothing has changed, and I’ve basically accepted the state of walking into class with no idea of what the lesson will be about or what the teacher will ask me to do. I used to hunt down the teachers days or hours before and ask them what would happen in each class and what they would like me to do, but often enough that all suddenly changed once class started and I still had to impromptu, or let my prepared activities fall by the wayside. This was actually more frustrating, so eventually I stopped asking.
The final irony of the situation is the contradictory mentality towards foreigners in Japanese culture. In a word, foreigners are “exotic,” with all the privileged and demeaning elements that entails. We are important enough that 5,000 of us are injected into the main-stream of the public school system yearly, and seen to be gifted enough that our mere presence should turn the country’s problems with internationalism around. However, we are unpredictable, in a land where “different” and “wrong” is the same word. The JET rules for the whole country dictate that an ALT should never ever be left unsupervised with students, that he is subordinate not only to the program, the BOE, and the school leadership, but also to each of the (real) teachers, and (most tellingly) that the ALT should not be allowed to connect his own computer to the school network (and so be able to access the deep secrets and national security information that I’m sure my rural Jr. High school is privy to. Seriously, though, the reason for not allowing us to connect is that we might misuse the information that every other (Japanese) employee of the school has access to). Now from a safety standpoint I can see the rationale, but coming straight from “Wild West” of ESL teaching in Czech Republic, where a US passport means that you are more automatically more qualified to teach English then Czech teachers who have spent years studying pedagogy, where I was thrown unsupervised into a class of elementary school students on my first day, and in 4 years of teaching was never once observed or told what to teach, well, comparatively it seems that Japan could muster up the courage to believe that the most rigorous application process I’ve ever experienced has produced employees that they can trust.
And so I’ve finally had to learn to be content with feeling like a parasite, and having lots of time to do my own writing, reading, emailing, staring out the window, and getting paid for it. But believe me, it’s not all it’s cracked out to be. I always try to remind myself that it could be worse. My school is neutrally friendly, and JTEs are easy to work with. I’ve heard stories of JTEs that were blatantly hostile to their ALTs, even actively trying to get them removed. One of my friends here broke-off his contract half way through and returned home because the students in his school were so out of control and violent that he feared for his safety. But that’s another story. In any case, I have it pretty easy, maybe too easy to handle for more than a year.
And that is my understanding, thus far, of why I have to talk about my “work” in quotations, and why I’d feel guilty adding this year to my “teaching” resume. It has, however, been a very Japanese experience!