rant
So, today I found out why, when last year, my various team teachers had a meeting with each other (ten feet from where I was sitting) to discuss the plans for the class I taught with them, I was never asked to attend.
According to this year’s head of the English department, who often handily lets cats out of bags, it was because of certained unnamed teachers who were “not comfortable” with having the meeting about English language conversation class held in English. And thus Ximena, obviously knowing not a lick of Japanese, could not be included in the proceedings, because we wouldn’t want that teacher to suffer or anything.
I know exactly who it was, of course. The one who did her best to undermine me in all of our classes, laughing and talking aside to the students about how she couldn’t speak English, tralala oh well!–It turns out she not only helped drive a wedge in class, but she passive-aggressively requested that I not be included in staff lesson plan meetings for her comfort, so I was always clueless as to the master plan, and had three different conversations with three different teachers each week to plan the same lesson.
The consequences of that disorganization affected students as well. I didn’t attend the meetings, but of course I wrote 50% of every exam. Because classes were all slightly different, the test sometimes covered material that some classes hadn’t touched on, but I wasn’t aware of it until grading the test. And all this could have been solved by my attending an occasional meeting. One might ask, what’s the point of my job here anyway? What are the taxpayers of Japan forking over for?
Fucking ho-bag bitch!! And fuck the rest of them too, for indulging her little personal issue at my expense. Yeah, it’s time to say bye-bye to Japan.
This on top of an exhausting day of fully grokking the school supply situation here at school. Japan is a rich country, you’d think there’s some money floating around in there for, say, enough teacher’s copies of the textbook? Apparently not, so this year I will be sharing one book with two other teachers, including a promising new JTE with a wry sense of humor, and less happily, the whiney once-a-week ALT who as of this year splits most of my classes with me, taking turns each week. (Which, incidentally, means we have to work together. Which was like pulling teeth last year, trying to pin something down while she says she’s busy, will find something later at home on the internet. This on top of the two-hour once-a-week class schedule, which is the worst possible way to learn a language, but I shouldn’t even get into it or I’ll never stop, though I’m on a roll here so why not?)
The kicker was a visit to the school library, to proudly show off my donation of over 60 English books ranging from elementary to high school reading levels. Whereupon I was told via my JTE, by the librarian who does not believe I can understand Japanese (who did however thank me profusely when he first received the box) that by the way they can’t actually be added to the library, because there is not enough shelf space for any more books. So I was like, this library is an empty room, can’t we like, get rid of that dusty wall of unopened encyclopedias to make room for something students might actually read…? But no, at most I can pick out the best 10 to be displayed on a rotating basis. A display of books? WTF. Anyway, it’s a poor school indeed that can’t afford an extra shelf.
I’d had my fill, but there was one more kick coming–the five best girls in last year’s shipwreck of a class, who like me personally and always give me at least some kind of effort? They made a tiny class of them, representing the best English students in the whole school, and gave the class to Whiney ALT. What the fuck ever, I say again. I tried, I really did. I’m so outta here.
Unfortunately, in some ways, I’m leaving just as I feel I might finally be hitting my stride teaching- and classroom management-wise. But there’s no way I could take another year. The way I see it, my school with help from the taxpayers of Japan is funding my immenent psych-ward hospitalization and therapy.
My bike mechanic friend down the street suggested, when I stopped by to rant about incompetence, that I ask her how much she paid for uraguchi-nyuin (bribing one’s way into college, literally “back door freshman”), or maybe what the kaedama (substitute) who took her teaching license exam cost back in the day, hahaha. Great guy, Hiroshi. Even if he did remind me to keep an open heart lest it become small and hard from hatred. Yeah whatever, my heart is a pebble of black tar.
Like I told my friend the Korean ALT, as I finished telling him my story, I could just cry at the way things are run at this supposedly well-funded school. And what’s worse is that I’m certain American schools are in even far more depressing shape.
“Uh-huh,” he said, deep in thought. “Do you think I’ve lost weight?”
No Comments
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment