Demanding and Demeaning Work. - Anonymous employee American Language School Employee Review

My complaints are wide and varied. Once a student starts taking your class everything must be done from the textbook that has been decided for them (with little input from yourself). This means that great selection of textbooks is all but useless in practical terms - you have to go from the one the student was made to buy by the school, even if it isn't a good match for them. During my time teaching there, I discovered the world's worst ESL textbook. Elementary school students must be taught using a series called 'Let's Go!' which on the whole is very dry, the grammar is often very useless, and it takes eons to make any kind of meaningful progression. We have to do a two page spread every week and there is no breathing room to go back and check and make sure the children properly understand anything. (Hint: they don't) Many of the students would really rather be elsewhere, do not concentrate; talk over, ignore and even hit the teachers. And so the whole situation equates to pretend students pretending to learn English from pretend textbooks from a teacher who must teach according to the strict lesson plan guidelines. Nothing gets done. The whole exercise is a franchise for making money, nothing more. Management might as well have opened a Starbucks. Many others have said this, but the endless paperwork is demeaning and pointless. Lesson plans are to be written down to the number of breaths you intend to take. Being so strict, and being coupled with having to teach from a certain textbook each lesson, the whole task becomes a pointless chore. Everything is already so set in stone, why aren't the entirely of the "course" and lesson plans written out for posterity? It would save everyone a big hassle. More paperwork included the twice yearly student reports, on which you can't say anything bad or even constructive, and you can't give anything lower than an A- in grading their skills. Got to keep the customers happily paying out, after all. Events for times like Halloween and Christmas are soul-crushingly tiring, busy, pointless, and cringe-worthy. These fun events run all week and are on top of doing normal adult classes to. The worst is Presentation Day, where students must present everything they learnt over the year to their parents. Lots of extra work must go into this outside of normal hours, and for what? Remember I said earlier that we race through the (poor, badly paced) material without checking understanding for the whole year? Then this is dumped on us. Students and teachers alike loathe this day and the run up to it. It's painful for all involved. Meetings are run just like anywhere in Japan. You get a printout and someone reads from it. No one has any questions and the whole two hours just ate into your already lacking prep-time. An email would suffice, or do they think us so unintelligent we cannot comprehend it on our own? Management at my school was never around. They came and went as they pleased. Questions went to the assistants, who often didn't know either. Do not take a day off or it will come back to bite you. It would be brought up time and again. Even though I gave proper notice and other teachers agreed to cover my lessons, it was used against me many times. All in all, I got the strong vibe that management don't care about the teachers, students, or even English education. The whole thing is just a cash cow.