I am so overwhelmed that I don’t know where to start. I forgot how much the learning curve of a new teaching job sucks the life out of me. I begin to forget that I am anything but a teacher, and have any responsibilities or rights outside of being a teacher. I have 28 classes a week with over 75 students across 11 different curricula (4 main categories). Each of the 4 categories of curricula has a specific formula for delivering content, rituals for each transition in class, and even verbal patterns that the kids depend on for knowing what is expected. I learned in my first kids’ class that they literally only know the vocabulary, sentence patterns and instructions that they have been taught before: the difference between an ESL environment (where English is spoken around them outside of class) and the EFL environment that is Japan. I had understood this intellectually during my training, but the impact on the classroom environment is staggering. So much of what I do to entertain my native English students in my previous schools just confuse the poor students here. And I am learning quickly that “sit down” will always result in them sitting, while “have a seat” makes them all look at me funny. So practically everything in my teaching repertoire is getting an overhaul, minor or major, and mostly major. It seems like I still have the gift of being able to excite kids but not knowing how to calm them down… although I think all my personal work around how structure and authority helps kids feel safe has improved my classroom management skills– I am now willing to tell them directly and clearly to stop, which before I was timid about for fear of scarring them or getting backlash.
Also making my job difficult is all the scheduling puzzles. The length of the class is dependent on the number of people enrolled in it, not on how many attend, so I have made a few mistakes in starting and stopping classes at the right time. One student’s class I missed completely because I did not realize he had decided to start with us, only that he was thinking it over. He seemed fine when he came in the next day for a make up, but it strained the relationship with the office manager and my boss. Each day’s schedule is different and may not be the same week to week. At least I am only at one location, unlike some of my coworkers! Maybe 5 times (out of 28 classes) I messed up something with the schedule in my first week, but every time increased an underlying sense of not-good-enough that started to eat at me. I mean, I know it is the first week, and if my employers are reasonable they will get that it is one heck of an undertaking, given that I need to learn all the curriculum, make sense of how it is put together, remember each student’s needs, discover for the first time in my life what is appropriate for each level of ability, adopt a mostly new style of teaching, and do all the organizational and logistical tasks to keep everything moving along. And I should not neglect the fact that I am living in a foreign country while doing all of this. I don’t think it’s a huge factor (except for the blasted heat) but it is definitely affecting the smoothness of my life in various small ways, like my A/C that turns off every three hours and I can’t read the remote or manual, so I wake up multiple times every night drenched in sweat. Not as big an issue as the others, but adds to my stress.
Mid week I almost cried everywhere as all of this piled up and then I got a call from the head office. In Japan, nothing is direct, so my boss at my school had called my boss at the head office to report on my progress. Then the head office boss called to tell me what they said. It was mainly positive- they were impressed with “how i handled myself” (which I still don’t really know quite what that means, given the critiques they had) and felt they made the right choice in picking me for their location. The negative feedback was that I did not appear professional enough: too much jewelry (granted, but no one had said anything yet) and my clothes were not up to par.
Now, this clothes thing has been a huge deal for me, logistically and emotionally. The amount of overweight people in Japan is 3%, and in the US is 30%. Apparently it wasn’t just my subjective self-consciousness that made me feel like there are 10 times more overweight people in the USA vs Japan! A few weeks ago on TV there was an american news segment that panned across the politician audience and I remember being shocked at so much overweight-ness, and then realized that it’s because I had gotten used to Japan, where so many people look exactly as thin as they are drawn in anime! Hopefully this will be motivational, but it’s hard being a walking stereotype! There are no clothes for me here, and even when I found some, after looking for stores for over 3 weeks, they are all “drape over other shirts shirts”, not proper collared office wear. Even if I can find something that’s the right size, the cut is all wrong because of where I store fat being different, so it still doesn’t fit. Shopping for clothes in the last decade has always been demoralizing; this was just horrid. The best thing I could do was these mens short-sleeved collared shirts which, if I sit with good posture, my boobs start to explode from. Since the only suits in my size I could find were WAY too big and WAY too expensive, I bought some online, shipped them to my sister, who shipped them to me. They are too tall for me, so I was waiting to get them altered, and, of course, alterations don’t work the same in Japan (does anything?) and so it turns out there is not really private tailor shops here; everything is done Nordstrom’s style. So after getting this comment about my clothes, the next day I got a bunch of safety pins and “altered” my suits and it looked okay. But I was sweating even more! Does it really look more professional for me to be sweating all over the place? I have been getting to work 45 minutes early and going to the well-A/Cd cafe on the ground floor of the building so I can stop sweating after walking to work (only 10-15 mins, but everything is soaked through by then), put on my suit in the cafe’s restroom, wait for the renewed sweating to stop, then go upstairs to my school (with less A/C) and sit in front of a fan prepping until the third round of sweating stops. you guys know how uncomfortable I am when I am hot, so this daily event is really draining! It is seriously making me consider not being in Japan next summer and hiding in Europe somewhere, because I am miserable until around 8pm (as long as I can be in a tank top and shorts, otherwise it is just always too humid!). So should I share all this with my employer so they understand why me trying to wear slacks, a collared long sleeve shirt and a blazer is not going to work? Or do their clients not care, so they can’t care? I don’t know, but it is a huge factor that is bring me down.
So this week, I would rate all but maybe 3 of my classes as good enough or above, which is a huge accomplishment. this week I didn’t really use the textbooks, except for the lower levels, where I just did review. The problem was with my jr high and older classes, where I misjudged their level of free conversation skills and tried to do a “pretend we’re all in a band together” project that had them practice their music vocabulary and do something creative so I could get a feel for their ability and personalities. Out of the 5 or so classes that I did this in, only 2 of them really understood what the activity actually was (I think one poor group thought I was going to make them actually perform as this band!), and the rest were tortured either by disinterest or frustration at not having the skills to communicate what they were thinking. Without knowing it, I was kind of mean to say “Let’s be creative!” when they don’t have the knowledge to be that free with English yet. They are trapped in the confines of the textbook-style sentence structures. So I at least learned the hard way to stick to the textbooks so I don’t undermine their confidence or their ability to interact with me and each other in English.
But that means that I need to understand the textbooks, and frankly, I’m intimidated. The lower level texts, I get. And I understand the format for each lesson– it’s ‘just’ a matter of driving it home so I do it habitually. But for the Jr High and Adult level textbooks, I 1) don’t really get how to organize the lesson and can’t find it in my notes from training, and 2) don’t know English grammar well enough to feel confident teaching the content. Just like when I tried to be a math teacher, I feel the weight of needing to comprehend the developmental stages of learning the subject (what is prerequisite to what) in order to deliver content with confidence. I think this is a large part of why they say it takes at least 6 months to master the material. But what are you doing in those six months if you don’t understand what you are teaching?
I take my role as a teacher very seriously. For some of these students, my English is the first English they have ever experienced. I even have one student who is 18 months old, and so my naming of colors is the first naming of colors he has ever experienced, because he has not even attended Japanese preschool yet. I still have so much resentment and anger toward my inadequate and often painful educational experiences that I fear inadvertently doing harm, or, more likely, inhibiting potential, through my fledgling teaching skills– maybe just by teaching something in the wrong order. Subsequently I am fascinated and engrossed by more experienced teaching and complete curricula like these textbooks. My need to understand is also a need to release control and put faith in these teacher’s techniques and the author’s curricula as being good enough for my students. This is the first time in my teaching career where I have felt the closest balance of ignorance and safety to be relieved that the work of designing curricula and class structure has been given to someone else. When teaching math, I thought I was more qualified than others to figure out how best to teach it, and the responsibility of that nearly tore me apart. I tried to reinvent the wheel by myself, in a process that is usually done by groups of people with more pragmatism and less idealism, and more experience and research to draw upon than my little heart could conjure up in those little schools. I learned this when I worked at Pearson, and it was a huge relief, even though I still have the sense that less mainstream curricula could meet the needs of minority learners better than books designed to sell to the thickest part of the bell curve.
So I am used to being the hero that sweeps into a little dysfunctional school and attempts to heal the rampant crises going on there, by being the “only one” who understands the plight of the students, willing to devote myself to saving them, spending all my energy to creating clever and revolutionary ways to help them discover their true potential and unlock the keys of their future. And for many years, I was unable to admit that I was ill-equipped to this, no matter how much I cared. I had never been trained as a teacher- I took 1 education class that was a critique of America’s education system (nothing about how to teach), wrote a thesis that I now understand to be a very thinly veiled rant about my own misfortune in education and a daydreaming exercise, and a series of jobs teaching in schools that had about the same proportion of idealism to experience as I did and were kept afloat seemingly by willpower alone. In this chaotic series of events, my attention shifted toward the emotional trials of my students just as I was able to tolerate looking at my own pain, and so then the thinly veiled self-interest moved into psychology and that degree and personal work. At that time, I finally had the strength to admit that while I certainly had a lot of the traits found in good teachers, I was not one, and if I wanted to be one, it would take a lot more practice, skill refinement and focused dedication to manifest what I wished for myself as a teacher. This turned out to be the exact same realization I had last year about becoming a therapist. Maybe I will decide to dedicate myself to one or both of these roles someday, but after noticing this pattern of thinly veiled self-focused aspirations, I started to wonder what my non-reactive-to-the-past desires were.
And that is why I am in Japan right now. Because one of those desires was travel. Another is writing, so I am working on my novel. Doing amazing things with my body, so studying martial arts. Singing, so studying music and putting together a combo again. Being in love, so learning what I feel. These are the actual things I am doing with my life– pursuing beauty. I am using teaching as a means to an end. But this week I forgot that, as the old “their educational lives depend on you” mentality settled in. Every night I had nightmares about teaching- I woke up trying to explain things, or giving classroom commands to the kids I had taught that day. Way too intense for my tastes.
Balancing this is going to be extremely tough. I need to do a good job at my job, for both the material means to stay in Japan and my own sense of integrity. But I cannot allow it to take over, because then my life has become teaching, and that is not what I have chosen. Perhaps these first few weeks will feel like it has taken over since it truly will take a lot of time to make sure I am prepared to teach and do what my students and employer need me to do, but I need to have something of my true purpose in every day so I can’t forget why I am here. As a comparison, one of the new teachers who was being trained the same time as me is outright bored by the explanations of the curriculum and observing the outgoing teacher, and I have never heard him express concern about the student’s learning (and his attitude suggests the opposite). My company hired someone with his level of devotion, so that lets me know that I can chill out a bit. I do wonder what his classes are like. Perhaps he is so unperturbed that he can figure out the formula and perform it faster than I can, I wouldn’t be surprised! But reminding myself that I am not here to save anyone or single-handedly revolutionize their education experience is key. Essentially, I am there to be an English voice example in their lives and give them some knowledge and practice in this non-essential for life subject. I am a bonus. And I need to remember that if my bosses get pissed off, I am literally working as hard as I can, AND I know I am very smart and organized and resourceful, so if they get pissed at me for not catching on fast enough, they are being unreasonable because this is really hard and I am doing a commendable job! And worse case scenario, if I somehow get fired, I will just move on to the next cool thing in my life. I mean, it’s not like I’d let my life get boring! And I have plenty of things I want to do!
So I hereby promise to spend even just 5 minutes every day, no matter how swamped I am, doing something ME- some step on my actual journey toward my dreams. And zoning out to anime doesn’t count, even though I will probably need to do that, too. ;)