English teaching for workaholics: satisfying but stressful
My first job in Tokyo was at a medium-sized English conversation ("eikaiwa") school chain's Akasaka Mitsuke branch. I stayed exactly one week.
The job interview was easy. My interviewer was a 30-ish British man who was a bit stiff and cold, but seemed impressed with me. That was on a Friday, and I had a second interview on Monday with the company president. The president was, as I'd been warned, intimidating--to an extent that I, and easily intimdatable 23-year-old foreigner, hadn't really expected. He told me that "under normal circumstances" the company didn't like to hire teachers who only planned (as I did then, back in 1989!) to stay in Japan for a year or two, but he turned around and offered me a three-month probationary period. The "normal cicumstances" business caused me to suggest maybe I should pass, but he talked me into trying it.
Significantly, the president didn't speak English; the meeting was conducted through an interpreter!
I started teaching that very afternoon; apparently what he called "normal circumstances" meant a time when they didn't need more teachers than they could get. A fellow teacher soon informed me that most teachers only stayed a year or two!
The school's teaching materials had all been created in-house by the teachers, though some may have been based on lessons from other books. Individual lessons were filed in cabinets by difficulty level, with the levels color-coded: for example, the easiest lessons were purple.
The system was set up for the convenience of the student, but to my mind it was a real headache for teachers. If a student showed up on a weekday at least ten minutes before the hour, they could have a 50-minute small group lesson which started on the hour. When a student came in and asked for a lesson, a receptionist would pull the student's file and assign it to a teacher.
Therefore, it was only ten minutes before a lesson began that I could know who I would be teaching. Then I would have to look at each student's record to see which of the thirty or so lessons within their color-coded level they hadn't already studied (or needed to review), find a lesson none of them had completed, and very briefly familiarize myself with it. In cases where a student was near to completing their level, there would be very few lessons that one or another of my class hadn't already had. An added complication was that another teacher might be teaching the same level in a given hour, and may have already chosen the lesson file I needed.
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