When I first got the job with JET, I tried going around the internet to find out what people with the job actually did. There were a few blogs out there, a couple of which were friends that had been on the program earlier, but they were all almost devoid of actual on-the-job information, instead, like this blog, focusing more on trips and general life in Japan. Well, probably the main reason, besides just the fact that who ever wants to read a blog about someone's boring job, is that you really don't do very much, so there's not very much to say. But anyway, I thought I'd make a post about the actual job just to inform any future JETs who were curious. Of course, ESID.
Since I was just an assistant, there was no lesson planning or test writing or worksheet grading (well, occasionally a little worksheet grading). Mainly I went to each of the three classes in each of the three grades (corresponding to US 7th, 8th, and 9th) once or twice a week for 3-5 out of the six periods each day.
The class starts with a greeting ("Good morning, everyone." "Good morning, Mr. Fay." "How are you doing today?" "I'm fine, thank you. And you?" "I'm fine too."), and then the three questions ("What day is it today?" "It's Friday." "What's the date?" "It's June first." "And how's the weather?" "It's sunny."). Then there's maybe some review of the previous class, or maybe we jump right into a new grammar point. For the new grammar points, usually the teacher and I would have talked beforehand and planned out a little dialog together to demonstrate the new point, usually around some daily life topic.
If we were starting the past tense for example it might go something like: "Mr. Fay, what do you usually do on Saturday?" "I usually clean my room." "What about last Saturday? What DID you do last Saturday?" "Last Saturday I practicED calligraphy. How about you? ..." (repeat with the teacher's Saturday). Then the teacher might ask if the students picked up the new grammar point and what it means. Some teachers might have a mini worksheet for the students to fill in based on the conversation while they're listening to it.
After this we would go over new vocabulary (or recap the previous vocabulary if we weren't starting something new). I or the teacher would hold the vocab cards, they would repeat the word after me twice while the teacher showed them the meaning on the back of the cards, and then we'd practice showing the Japanese and having them regurgitate the English words. Depending on the teacher we might have some simple game based around vocab review too, like having all the kids in one row/column stand up and race to say the English, with the last kid standing forcing their alternate column/row to stand and then repeating the process.
At this point the teacher would launch into a detailed description of the grammar and maybe I would wander around the classroom making sure they're not making any mistakes in copying down their notes. Later in class, or maybe in the next class, we would do exercises around the grammar point, maybe just out of the book, or maybe a worksheet the teacher came up with themselves. So maybe for these I would read an example or read some questions, or maybe just wander checking their work. If we had an activity in pairs and were one kid short, I would pair up with them for the activity. Some of the teachers would have me review their worksheets for these exercises and activities beforehand for errors, or design them in coordination with me.
Eventually we would get to the reading in the book for the grammar point. Usually each chapter would be broken into three sections, each with a new grammar point (usually related to each other), and three sections of a narrative, usually featuring a small cast of middle school characters, maybe going to an international food festival, or visiting London, or giving a class presentation on some international topic. They'd repeat the reading after me a couple times, and then maybe the teacher would have them relay read one line each going around the classroom, or else just have everyone stand up and read aloud at their desk, or alternating lines with each other in pairs. Again, I would pair with an odd student.
And then we would do the end of class greeting. ("Goodbye everyone." "Goodbye Mr. Fay." "See you next time." "See you.")
Very occasionally a teacher would ask me to plan an activity, especially maybe around Christmas or for the last class of a semester when they had finished all the lessons and had nothing left to do. Or sometimes if they were trying a new game, they would have me try to explain the rules in English (although half the time they would have to recap most of it in Japanese anyway).
A couple times a year there would be days when parents could come and observe classes, or when folks from the Board of Education (BOE) would come and observe a few classes for a few minutes each, and these were usually conducted like normal classes. But sometimes there would be a BOE viewing for the entire class period, and these classes were elaborately planned and prepared for beforehand with some special type of activity, and maybe even practicing for the class with the teacher after school.
Once a year the sixth graders in elementary school would come in the afternoon and choose a subject and we would do a class for those who chose English. This was usually some sort of simple game with very simple English, and the teacher usually wanted me to run most of it, if not even plan most of it myself.
My first year I was also going to an elementary school once a week. In the lower grades there we would usually just do some topical vocab like colors, numbers, shapes, animals, or fruits, and then just do games and activities around that. In the middle grades we might actually do a little bit of grammar like greetings or self-introductions or "I like...". In the higher grades we actually had textbooks and the lessons would focus on one sentence structure like "I have...", "I like...", "I want..." and we would go through the various activities in the textbook. My role in these classes was roughly the same as the middle school, where I would do vocab and model example sentences, do dialogs with the teacher, and interact with the students during activities. After that school closed I started going to a different one a couple years later, where I only did sixth grade.
Outside of class, I inherited an English board in the hallway at the middle school that I swapped out every month with something new. This was completely my own and was my main creative outlet and I think I did a pretty good job of making them interesting, although sometimes it seemed like the teachers were more interested in them than the students. Usually they were related to English in some way, although some of them were just cultural, and those ones might be almost completely in Japanese. I did topics like English names, cursive, the evolution of the alphabet, Halloween candy, Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas quizzes, US history, my summer vacations, or English profiles of celebrities, bands, and anime characters.
Besides the daily job, there were a few other English or international things that I helped with. Every year there was a sister city trip with our American sister city: one year with our kids going there, and the next year with their kids coming here. If our kids were going there, they would have me come in once a week in the evening to give some kind of English conversation practice/lesson, which was completely on me to plan and run. I would start out doing some basic chatting with them, have them give self-introductions, give an in-depth one of my own, and then go back and forth with them until they understood it. Then there were other activities, like having them order at a fast food restaurant, practicing the dialog at immigration at the airport, giving them a problem description in Japanese that they might have with their host family and then having them try to describe it in English, or giving them a word of some Japanese historical/cultural topic and having them try to explain it in English. I also made handouts of useful words/phrases, US cultural differences, and what US money looked like, and brought in a bunch of coins and $1 bills for them to pass around and look at.
When the US kids came, I went around with them and the Japanese chaperones every day with together with the American guy who runs the town English school and just helped interpret anything between the Japanese and US groups, or the tours given by the staff at the places we visited, or just sharing my knowledge of the town and Japan in general with the Americans and answering their questions.
Each year there's also an English speech contest, so if there were multiple students who wanted to do it, I would have to judge a practice speech of theirs and choose the two best to do the contest, and then coach them for the couple months leading up to the contest, not just on their pronunciation, but also the intonation and rhythm of their speech, and on public speaking in general, like how to show emotion, maintaining eye contact, and using appropriate gestures.
My town also had a small international food event every year where they would get two foreigners (usually the town's ALTs, but also any other foreigners they could find if all the ALTs had already participated previously) and have us come up with two recipes each to represent our country's food, which we would then cook together in the kitchen of the community center along with all the other Japanese participants (who would also make a couple Japanese dishes too). I made reubens and corn pudding for my two recipes.
Finally, the biggest component of my job outside of actually teaching at the schools was the weekly Monday night eikaiwa (English conversation) class that I ran. The leader of the club said that I was under no obligation to run it if I didn't want to, but of course every previous ALT had, so basically I had to too.
For this they would usually have me prepare some kind of material to go over, but it was so open-ended that it could be a bit difficult to come up with ideas. Some of the things I did were Aesop's fables (since they're so short that they were easy to go over in one class), worksheets on various grammar points (like "an INTERESTING book" vs. "an INTERESTED reader"), a set of vague newspaper headlines that could be interpreted in a humorous manner, various idioms and figures of speech, Yogiisms and Groucho Marxisms, or just me describing a vacation I had just gone on.
Lots of times they would come up themselves with various things to do too, like 20 Questions in English, or just preparing short comments on some topic that was given in the previous class, and often half, and sometimes the whole class, would be spent just in free conversation about what people had done in the past week.
So that about wraps up my contractual responsibilities, and all the various social obligations I had as the resident foreigner. As for the actual school job, I loved it, since the kids were a riot and I got to just be friendly with them all the time without having any of the responsibility of disciplining them. Plus I got to attend all the fun school events, like the sports festival, the cultural festival, the band concerts, and the baseball tournaments.
Although the social obligations were sometimes a little onerous, it was the best way for a foreigner to meet people in that small town, and I was only able to get into calligraphy and tea ceremony because of connections through those events. The eikaiwa group was also a good support group for various questions about Japanese life and culture (like how garbage sorting worked, or where I could find a store that sold a certain item), and sometimes there were other little perks, like getting a private tour of the recreational forest by one of the members, because he wanted to practice his English for when he gave the tour to overseas tourists.
In all, the job takes up a majority of your waking time in Japan, as it does anywhere, but it was the most fulfilling job I've ever had and I hated to leave it. So for anyone else accepted to or thinking about applying for the JET program, now you somewhat know what to expect, but remember: ESID.
