Team Teaching and Me

As the very title of the position implies, part of being an “Assistant English Teacher” is team teaching with the JTE or “Japanese Teacher of English”

I remember during my first year on JET, I was at a mid year conference and one of the 3rd years was explaining why he had refused to give a presentation on “Effective Team Teaching.”

“I told them there’s no such thing as ‘Effective Team Teaching’,” he said. “If you are doing team teaching, you are not being effective. If you are able to be effective, you’re not team teaching.”

This is a cynical view, but there’s a lot of truth in it. To a certain extent the way the whole program is set up, there is a lot of natural antagonism between the AET and the JTE. The JTEs often view their jobs as sticking as closely as possible to the textbook, doing no improvisations, and focusing on memorization. The AETs often view their job as trying to move the classroom away from this kind of teaching and create activities that make the students think more, but this is constantly in conflict with the JTE. Often the best thing for the AET to do is to be less ambitious and stay out of the JTE’s way. Or, as I remarked to a friend recently, “AET has got to be the only job where being lazy is actually an asset. I think that’s why I’ve survived so long doing it.”

Not to say I haven’t had some frustrating experiences with JTEs. During my time as an AET, both here and during my 3 years in Ajimu, I’ve taught with a lot of JTEs, and some of them I got along with better than others.

For instance when I first arrived in Ajimu, a couple of the JTEs I taught with who would seem perfectly content not to have me in their class. They would often leave me in the teacher’s lounge while they went off to teach. Since there was a fair amount of coming and going in the teacher’s lounge, as well as homeroom and moral education classes that they taught, I didn’t know when I was supposed to be teaching or not until I learned to read Japanese a bit and could decipher the school schedule.

Another teacher seemed to treat me just like a tape recorder. Not only did I have no creative input in the lessons, but my pronunciation, volume, rate of speaking, and even posture would be criticized. It was just like she was working a machine. One lesson she even started kicking at my legs. After a bit of confusion I realized she thought my legs were too close together, and that she thought a wider stance would be more appropriate.

Actually I could go on with story after story, some of them maybe trivial complaints on my part. But this week I had an incident which seemed to top them all.

I was teaching an elective English course for 9th grade students. This class has been a bit of a head-ache, because it is supposed to be a conversation class, but the Japanese English education system is not geared towards conversation, so it is difficult to make activities that the students are able to do, and yet at the same time conversation based. The JTE I teach with in that class is a bit of a crank; maybe you know the type. If I make an activity that the students can do, he grumbles that there is no conversation. If I make one with conversation, he grumbles it’s too hard. There’s a lot of grumbling from him, and it makes for tension in the class because when the students can’t answer a question he starts to mumble to himself, and I feel under pressure to get the students to answer quickly, so it is pressure on both me and the students.

Last week we were doing an activity on directions. There is a popular game used by many AETs in which one student closes his or her eyes, and the rest of the students direct him or her around the room shouting directions in English. We did it with one student and I thought it went pretty well. Most of the students in the class shouted out directions in English, and I jumped in to yell out, “Stop!” whenever she was in danger of hitting something. She bumped her hand against a desk a couple times but she was walking slow enough it wasn’t a problem. But when I asked for another volunteer he suddenly exploded, yelling out, “Yamero! Abunai no de!”

Which means, “Stop it! This is dangerous!”, but that’s not really an adequate translation, because it doesn’t take into account the different levels of politeness in Japanese speech. He was using the harshest level possible, probably something along the lines of, “Knock it off you idiot.” But, as with English, what he actually said was only half of it. The way he said it, yelling out suddenly, really shocked me.

At the time I was just thinking about maintaining composure and keeping the class going, so I just said, “Uh, okay, well let’s do this work sheet instead then,” and starting passing the sheet out.

It was only afterwards that I had time to think, “Did that really happen? Am I exaggerating things in my mind, or did he really explode like that? What was he so mad about? Wasn’t there another way he could have reacted?

The students were whispering about it after class as well. I overheard things like, “boy, the teacher really got mad at Joel,” and things like that.

I have no idea if this is normal behavior or not. Although Japan is stereotyped as being a polite culture, seniors are permitted to talk to their subordinates in harsher terms than would be accepted in America. On the other hand I’ve never seen anyone explode like that in class before. And over such a little thing.

I related the incident to Shoko on the phone and asked her opinion. She didn’t think it was normal, but she did comment, “You always have such interesting stories from your school day. Nothing interesting ever happens to me at my job.”

That’s true. At least I get another story out of the whole thing.

Interesting Update: since I first wrote this post I ran into another AET who used to teach with this same teacher, and appearently had the same kind of problems. Appearently this particular teacher just doesn't like AETs, and has the habit of blowing up sometimes. Good to know it's not just me.