Arrrgh! (And not in the fun piratey way): a rant

There are 7 elementary schools in my town. I teach at 3 of them, and Suzie, the other ALT in my town, teaches at the other 4. To make sure the kids are learning the same thing, a representative from each school attends monthly meetings to make and discuss lesson plans (which are written in English and Japanese). This is a good idea. Standardized learning, sharing the workload, why not? However, what seems to be forgotten by the teachers who attend this meeting is that of the 2 ALTs they employ, one of them does not speak Japanese. Me. and Suzie does not speak formal, education specific Japanese. This means that I understand about 5% of what is said at the meeting. These meetings run for a minimum of an hour and a half.

The meetings always start off with a re-cap of how the lessons went the past month. This is good-- it helps us learn what teachers liked, how much students are learning, after all, Suzie and I are not trained teachers-- they are. However, this often turns into a "what the ALT did wrong" session. "The story you told didn't explain Halloween." Well no, it didn't-- because at last month's meeting we all decided it would be a ghost story, using words from the previous lesson. "Previous ALTs wrote up a little handout in Japanese for the kids to read so they could understand." Why didn't you mention that before we finished teaching this lesson? "The students didn't understand." I thought they did-- they all repeated the words back to me, why didn't the homeroom teacher let me know? It's very one sided-- we are not asked to evaluate how homeroom teachers worked with us-- if they read the lesson plan before we started, if they helped explain a complicated game, or translated words when students were confused.

What the teachers also fail to realize is that Suzie and I are both functional adults. This means that we are, in fact, capable of figuring out ways to adapt lessons to different class sizes. So no, we don't need to dedicate the next 10 minutes to deciding how big the groups should be for actives, because really, last time I checked, we have the ability to improvise lessons, we have been teaching for a year now, to classes of 8 students and classes of 30 students.

I appreciate these meetings, really I do. I think it's great to share the workload, to have qualified teachers help with lesson plans, and to learn how lessons went. But the simple things-- like how I can't understand their evaluations, discussing small details to no end, and not giving me or Suzie credit for being able to sort out small problems on our own... arrrgh!

Ok. I'm done now.