I have always loved people and language.They go together.People + language = communication.To me, communication is one of the most enjoyable things in life.

But I realized that language education in Japan is not focused on communication.This seemed very strange to me.I was working in a “juku”/conversation school.Every day I would spend time in junior high school “juku” classes, giving listening tests and checking their pronunciation and then go to conversation classes to teach adult students how to speak a language that they had already studied for 6 to 10 years.I wondered why so few Japanese could speak English.

What’s worse, I was given no training as a teacher.When I joined that school, the teacher whom I was supposed to replace had already left.Most of the other teachers at the school also had no formal training, but they at least had one week to visit all the classes with the old teacher.For quite a long time, most of my classes were free conversation classes, because I had no idea how to teach anything else.And for this my students were paying between \16,000 and \32,000 per month.I was young and I didn’t think about it ? my work wasn’t difficult, even if it wasn’t always exciting, so I never thought about changing it.

A year and a half later, I moved to Tokyo.There the situation was basically the same.Since I already had experience working at an English school, they didn’t bother to give me a training course.I never observed classes taught by other teachers and I was never offered a training course.Any teaching skills I had were entirely self-taught.I read the teacher’s manuals for the textbooks I used, I asked veteran teachers advice on teaching certain classes, and I read magazines and books about teaching English.

At first, I thought I was an exception ? just unlucky.But after a while, I realized that very few of the friends that I had who were also teachers had been given any training at all, and teachers that had received training had only received a simple cursory course in how to use the material taught at a certain school.I have rarely heard of teachers being given follow-up training courses after they have started teaching unless they pay for it themselves.Most teachers that I know say that they are on their own.The companies they work for don’t seem very interested in their training.

After a year and a half in Tokyo, I received a call from my first school with an offer to return as a manager.The pay was a little bit better, so I accepted.When I arrived, I found one foreign teacher with a nearly empty schedule.Soon after, I hired two new teachers and started an advertising campaign for new students.

Immediately, I started trying to train the teachers.I realized that it’s actually very difficult because real teacher training takes a lot of time and, of course, the company needs teachers to work and bring in money as soon as possible.I was caught between the company, the teachers and the students and responsible to all of them at the same time.Eventually, I worked out a system in which all the teachers came together once a week for a meeting.In that meeting, we asked each other questions about teaching certain material or grammar and about any problems we had in classes.Sometimes we shared new ideas or new materials we had found that everybody could use to make classes better and more fun.When I first announced the meetings, I was worried that the teachers would complain about the extra work time, but I soon found out that they were very happy to have a chance to ask questions and receive help.That was a very exciting time for me.All of us teaching at that school were very happy with our jobs and comfortable with our teaching ability.

In the end, I had to quit that job.Because I was the manager, I had a higher salary than the other teachers.In fact, my salary was \50,000 higher.At some point, this became a problem with the management of the school.They felt now that the English Conversation section was strong enough to survive without a manager.They wanted to save some money by cutting my salary back to that of a regular teacher.As they discussed my salary, I became angrier and angrier.I finally decided that I needed to get out of teaching English for a while and learn more about Japanese society.So I quit the school.Incidentally, a year or two after I quit, I found out that the English conversation section of the school had steadily lost students until there was only need for one teacher.This year, I visited that city, but the school is gone.