Okay, so, almost everyone who comes to Japan and teaches in public school will have this experience. It's called an open lesson, which means you are doing a team teaching lesson with the JTE (Japanese Teacher of English), and some teachers from your school and other schools, as well as a few people from the Board of Education (BOE) would come and watch your lesson. After the lesson, there would be a meeting where they would praise the good things in the lesson and rant about the bad stuff.
This is what we had last week. Unfortunately, the JTE wanted to include the T-NET (part time Native English Teacher) as well as me, the NET (Native English Teacher). I thought it was a bad idea from the beginning, since the Aussie T-NET doesn't have much when it comes to teaching skills...but the school desperately wanted to show off that they have two foreigner teachers. Also the JTE and the T-NET are both same age, same sex, same interest old guys, so they are on good terms. Whatever, I thought, after all I had no problems with any of them. However, I prepared myself for the worst, because the T-NET screwed up a lesson a few days before the open lesson.
This was a regular lesson we taught together for 3rd graders, and it was their last lesson before graduation. I proposed the topic of "What will you be doing in 10 years?" Me and the T-NET would each give a short 1 or 2 minutes speech, not more that 10 simple sentences to the students, then ask them to write about how they imagine their own future. As usual, the T-NET prepared a hundred slides and a full 5 minutes speech with lots of difficult words and useless information (way too many details). After the students wrote their short compositions and read them out, we had a Q&A session, when the kids would ask us questions they prepared. Did they have a lot of questions! Again, the Aussie guy would keep answering the questions in so much detail that he robbed the students of their time to ask more questions. It was not only rude, but unprofessional. That's when I got pissed the first time. How much does he like to listen to his own voice? When is he going to notice that the lesson is about the students and not about him? I discussed it with the female JTE we taught the lesson together with, and she agreed with me.
See, that's the problem with people who, just like him, come here on a holiday working visa for a year, to play around, they are not professionals (yes, I have a teaching licence), they just came here to relax and see the world, and they tend to think they are more important than they actually are...so they screw up your lessons, if you are assigned to teach a lesson together. Usually you are not asked to, because most schools have only one foreigner, but God knows why, here they always want to push us to teach lessons together, because the students get more excited. Whatever...
Anyway, after this incident, I got alert about the open lesson. We had a practice lesson the day before the real thing. That's when this Aussie bastard started acting like a jerk. We totally had no trouble up until then. So after this trial lesson, I went to the JTE because I noticed a pretty bad mistake on the handout. I told him what I think would be a better phrase to replace it. We were right in the middle of the conversation, when the old Aussi guy (59 this year btw) came between us, turning his back on me as if I weren't there, and told the JTE how to rephrase the mistaken sentence. As if it was his idea?! He was standing close enough to hear what we were talking about, then he just walks up, pretends I'm not even there, pushes me out of the conversation and presents the whole thing as if it was his idea. I was pretty shocked to be honest...but oh, well. He is probably obsessed with proving people that he is a competent teacher...or maybe he is just being snobbish about being a "real" native English speaker, because I'm from a not English speaking country. Who knows?
It was just so rude and kind of childish. So I decided to ignore him afterwards.
Next day, we had the open lesson. It went pretty well. Only one teacher from a different school came, a few of my school and two BOE guys. They had a few comments on the lesson, both good and bad. The meeting was held in Englsih coz the Aussie can't speak Japanese. I still ignored him, and quite enjoyed his speech, how great HIS lessons are, how creative HE is when he makes a lesson plan blah, blah, blah. He totally talked as if it was his school and if he would be the only NET here. I don't really like talking at these meetings anyway, so I quietly enjoyed the show....LOL He tried to seem so busy and important. It was rather ridiculous. I don't know why he started behaving like this, but thank God, he will be gone next Friday. Part-time NETs contracts end in early February.
My contract ends March 31st, but I'll probably come back to this school next year too. I hope the next T-NET will be someone with actual teaching experience in Japan, who is hopefully young. The generation gap is way too big between the students and him. When they ask him about movies or music, he would start talking about some 50 or 40 years old black and white movie, or some long forgotten band, that the kids are not familiar with at all. Then, the conversation just fades out, and the kids look really confused. I wonder if he ever actually noticed that. Next year, someone young and possibly female please!! Excuse my typing mistakes please...it's been a long week, and I have part-time language school teaching to do tomorrow all day... (T_T)
So, that's the story behind the scenes.
Stay tuned, 'coz I'll be back this weekend with a Valentine's Day special post!
( ＾＾ )ノ" Bye-bye!
( ＾＾ )ノ" Bye-bye!
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