Why I Haven't Returned to Teaching English

I really don't have time to be writing this, and I'm sure friends will just roll their eyes and say I'm using avoidance tactics again. And they probably wouldn't exactly be wrong.

But there's something that seems to really need to be said.

I apologize for the length of this, and for not doing the expository thing where I tell you up front and then tell you in detail, and then tell you again. If I approach it directly, most people's immediate reaction will be to argue with me.

Yes, I am a good teacher. Yes, I have the skills teach English, certain science fields (particularly computer science), and math, among other things.

Japan, just like the US, just like much of the rest of the world, needs good teachers -- I mean, really, really needs good teachers, in all subjects -- except the current most popular subjects. (Actually, that's, except the subjects that were most popular two-to-six years ago. There's a delay between demand and supply called getting the degrees.) 

Why? Where are the good teachers and why aren't they teaching?

There are three parts to answering that question, and I'll start with the easiest one first.

There are a lot of mediocre and bad teachers in the education industry. (Don't argue with me on this, education has become an industry.)

And when they see a good teacher at work, they become jealous, and fearful for their jobs. And they start resorting to defense tactics -- mostly subconsciously, I think. I hope.

What defense tactics?

• Reports and other paperwork are not inherently evil. But they can easily be overdone in volume and style, and other aspects. Overdoing such things eats away at preparation time and other important resources.
• Likewise, meetings and evaluations are not inherently evil. Likewise about volume, structure, and goals, and about eating resources.
  
• Inventing new approaches is a good thing. Trying to enforce them on everyone else is pure evil.
  
• Praise and critique are important and good. Faint/false praise and hidden sniping are evil.
  

For some reason, mediocre and bad teachers are very good at turning attempts to improve things into defense tactics.

And, truth be told, the mediocre and bad teachers could be good teachers if they would actually engage with their subject matter while engaging in defense tactics, and if they would actually dare to engage with their students in meaningful ways (and not just in discussing whatever the currently popular topics are and otherwise currying student favor and encouraging teacher's pets).

Why are so many teachers willing to undermine the education systems?

Here's where I really get into controversial stuff.

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said it. I'm not sure. It was one of those guys who worked on the US Constitution and played an important part in the birth of the US of A.

Public education should be for children who don't have family who can pay for their private education, was part of the idea. And it should be limited to three years, just enough to get the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. From there, from about the age of nine, ten, or eleven, education should be primarily the responsibility of the individual, initially guided by parents or legal guardians -- individual students, individual children choosing their own courses through the school of life.

I may be remembering that wrong, as well, but I think that's the gist of it.

Education is a lifelong process, and there is nothing more suppressive to education than to force people to study what they have no preparation for and to delay them unreasonably from studying what they are already prepared for. Public education programs can't avoid both pushing students too far ahead and holding them too far back. It's simply in the nature of systems.

The education industry itself engages in defense tactics. Schools are by no means the only source of what they advertise as their main products -- knowledge and education. And I'm going to refrain from repeating myself in analyzing what the industry does, by means of those who run it. 

Wait. If it's true of public education, why isn't it true of private education?

In Japan, Juku has this problem in spades. The Ministry of Education has been trying to reform the entrance examination systems for several decades, but teaching for the tests is viewed as the lifeblood of the juku. 

Teachers who have not yet obtained tenure do not want to risk their safety net if the don't get re-hired next year, any more than those juku teachers who have not had public education experience. Nor do tenured teachers want to risk their post-retirement options.

Thus, teaching the tests has become entrenched in private education.

Teaching the tests is not education. Can't we finally get past that?

Tests are supposed to be opportunities for the students to stretch and evaluate their mental muscles, but they have primarily been perverted to gate-keeper roles where there should be no gate-keepers -- or, rather, where gate-keepers should be there to help, not prevent.

Tests are being used as tools of exclusion, which is in direct opposition to the only valid purpose of both private and public education.

In Japan, three years is not really enough to master reading and writing.

In the modern world, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are no longer enough.

But we wouldn't be asking them to master anything at school. Mastering things would be done in real world. 

If we want to solve the teacher shortage, we need to integrate the education industry with the real world.

Anyway, since the bike-car accident I had about five years ago, I just don't have the energy to engage in the constant battles that go on between what should be and what is in the education industry.