The End of One Year and The Beginning of Another

Well, Spring Break is over, and I’m back in Gifu and back at work now for a new school year.

I’ve written about this before, but every new school year in Japan about 1/3 of all the teachers get shuffled around to different schools. It seems like a strange system from my American perspective. I think they do it to keep the schools rounded out and prevent teachers from getting too entrenched in anyone school.

Even though I know it’s coming, it is always a bit strange when I have to say good-bye to teachers I’ve gotten comfortable working with, and then meet new faces.

Monika, the other AET (Assistant English Teacher) in this town has also decided to move on. Monika and I had both arrived in September. I had written previously that my general philosophy is to stay at least a year in any one place before I move on, but apparently Monika does not share this view. She found a better paying job elsewhere in Japan, and has packed her bags and moved on.

I’m actually getting my schools shuffled around somewhat as well. In my town there is one Junior high school and four elementary schools that feed into it. Previously I had taken the junior high school and one elementary school, and Monika had taken the other three.

I’m still going to be primarily at the junior high school and at one elementary school, but the elementary school I’m taking is going to be swapped. This is because of the “pilot program.”

Japanese schools have all sorts of pilot programs all over the country. When I was in Ajimu, they had a pilot program to better coordinate the curriculum between the high school and the junior high. To that end, Math and English high school teachers would come to the Junior high school once a week to team-teach classes. A fairly simple idea, but they made a big production about it. Lots of meetings and reports, and every so often they would have demonstration lessons, and educators from all over the country would come down to watch.

The pilot program in my new town is to try and coordinate the English curriculum in the elementary school with the junior high school curriculum. Out of the four elementary feeder schools, only one is being used to test this pilot program. So since I’m based in the junior high school, it was decided to switch my elementary school to the one participating in the pilot program.

Which makes sense, although I had become comfortable with the school I was at, felt like I was getting on well with the kids and the other teachers, and was not happy to hear I was being transferred. But such is life. I’m sure in a couple months I will be at home in the new school.

I guess the only major complaint I would have is that in all the confusion and the shuffling, nobody bothered to tell me I was getting transferred to another school. The elementary school had a good-bye party for me, and I was asked to stand up and say a few words, and all I could really say was, “So, it sounds like I won’t be here next year. Although no one has said anything to me about it yet, so I don’t really know.” At this point someone spoke up to confirm that I was going to be transferred, so I said something like, “Oh what’s that? OK, so I won’t be here next year then? OK, well then it was a good year and I’ll miss you all next year.”

As for the pilot program itself: as it is a pilot program, everything has to be made up from scratch. There is currently no English curriculum in the elementary school, so one will have to be made up. It will be a lot of work, and I’ll be a bit more in the spot light as there will be a lot of people watching this pilot program to see how it turns out.

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I’ve decided this will be my last year in Japan, and I to be honest I was somewhat hoping to just coast through the last year on the experience I already had, and not bite off any big projects. So that plan is down the drain.

But on the other hand this will be a new challenge and it will change things up and make things interesting. And if I work hard at it, I think it will be rewarding as well. In fact I’m finding myself almost tempted to stay two more years instead of one to see how the whole pilot program turns out.