English Sensei Spirit: My Year Without JTEs

Last school year I heard my vice-principal half-whispering to my principal:  “Oh, Amanda?  She can do it.”

“It” was teaching two out of three junior high school grades without a JTE.   We had gone from three JTEs to two because of students-to-staff proportional downsizing, and it was just too many classes for them to teach.  To get around me not having a Japanese teaching license, there was a teacher from another subject assigned to each of my classes.  Sometimes that teacher was fluent in English, sometimes not.  They were helpful, but there was no question: I was 100% in charge.  I planned all my 3rd grade classes as well, which I did have with a JTE.

My class print-out binders show the extent of the workload change: the binder for 2011-12 is almost twice the size of the binder for 2010-11.  I had planned full classes in years past, so I wasn’t completely without a clue, but it was with nowhere near the volume of classes I planned this year.

Setting a routine was being the best planning decision I made.  First, students would ask a partner English questions of the day.  Then, a randomly picked group demonstrated the questions and their answers.

After that, the students wrote an answer to a question in their journals.  And finally, they worked on a project – an oral presentation on a foreign country or writing letters to other ALTs, or any number of other projects I came up with.

I tried to balance fun with actual English practice, and find activities students like.  The last part ended up being the most difficult, as my particular students seemed to hate every tried-and-true recommended-at-CLAIR-orientation game like Criss Cross.

I started using my planner regularly and learned how to read the calendars from staff meetings for schedule changes.  I tried to plan an entire semester in advance, but that failed, because there continued to be schedule changes decided even after the semester started.

I learned a whole lot of student names, and learned kanji for other names so I could at least read nametags.  It made it much easier to use names when calling on a student in class, or telling a student talking to stop it.  The students and I had a much stronger relationship, and they respected me.  Telling someone to stop in English usually got results – even if they didn’t understand all the words in the sentence, they knew they were doing something wrong.

Other teachers respected me more too.  After a first year class was late multiple times to the English classroom with no real excuse, I gave them a lecture in Japanese about how class started when the bell rang.  The students stared at me, the most silent they’d ever been while I was talking.  The other teacher in class with me remained silent.  Later she related the events to that grade’s head teacher, who laughed and told me I did a good job.

It was difficult for me to take days off, because if I was gone at JHS in anything other than 3^rd grade, the class had to be replaced with a non-English class.  Planning and grading work was constant, and I often had to do it on my twice-a-week visits to elementary school.

There was a little overtime, a little working at home.  I was always very tired on weeknights, and my JLPT N2 score reflects that mustering up the energy to study Japanese was something I failed miserably at.

I won’t lie – I didn’t conduct class entirely in English.  Sometimes, it was worth it to repeat instructions multiple times in English until a bright and outgoing student got it and spoke up.  In other situations, I was losing minutes that the kids could be using to reinforce what they just learned.  Especially so with shy classes, where no students would volunteer and if called on would mumble “I don’t know” in lieu of answering, whether they understood or not.  I still only had one class with each grade a week, and that’s not a whole lot of time to spend interrogating shy students as to the meaning of my English.

My year mostly without JTEs is over now, and I received thank you notes from some of my JHS 3rd grade students.  They’ve had me for 2.5 years, all but one semester, and many of the things they wrote warmed my heart.  “I was able to communicate in English.”  “Getting a letter back from the ALT I wrote to made me happy.”  “I like your class!”

All those notes but the last were in Japanese, though.  I don’t know what next year will bring for my school and class and JTE wise, but I know my next goal:  I will work toward making those final messages in spontaneous English, no matter how broken.

Amanda Hahn (hahnamanda@gmail.com) is a third-year Kobe ALT.  Some of her lesson and project plans from the past few years are online at Kobe SpeakRaku (http://www.speakraku.com).