Number one: cosplay
Only joking- I mean of course that the status of English teachers is not so obviously low that when I met the love of my life and asked her to marry me she actually agreed!
You won’t hear a lot about it on the TEFL forums, but there are actually a lot of other advantages to choosing Japan to teach in: (more…)
… was called Ranald MacDonald (no relation to the most famous American clown in Japan*, I believe) and was also the first English teacher to discover that Japan can be both an adventure and safe and pleasant, being at least as useful to the Japanese for sending positive reports back home as he was for telling them about the rest of the world and “internationalizing” them. Sounds just like the average JET teaching assistant.
Other interesting similarities and differences include:
Japanese women start off thinking the fact that their foreign boyfriends treat them like gentlemen means they will be even more weak than their seemingly gruff fathers who end up letting their wives make all the decisions.
Foreign guys start off thinking their Japanese girlfriends are more meek and submissive than their more obviously combatative and straightforward Western mothers.
Leave to stew for a few weeks, months or years, and let battle commence…