The mystery of Japanese motivation solved!

I have been newly reminded of the dangers of using loaded words like “mystery” when talking about “the East” by the book “Orientalism” (Edward Said), but as mystified is how I have often felt on this topic I can find no better word. Not that any of that matters anymore anyway, because the mystery is now solved!

Having grappled for four years with conundrums such as students who profess their desperate need for English and then using every tactic to extend the opening chat at the beginning of the class, students who refuse to study more than once a week but ask for extra homework, students who ask to retake the same level and then complain about lack of progress, HR departments that do everything to ensure the progress of their employees who are studying English apart from paying a bit extra so they can be split into properly graded classes, students who love finding out cultural titbits in the class but have never been on holiday abroad etc. etc, I finally realised- I too, in a previous life, was a Japanese English language learner!

Way back in my university days, one of the Physics MA students from France decided to offer French lessons once a week at lunchtime, and for our various motivations about 20 or so of the people on my course signed up. I don’t know if anyone else was planning on applying for a job in CERN, but apart from that the needs of Physics students for conversational French are, I imagine, fairly low. I wouldn’t say we were unmotivated, though. In fact some, like myself, ended up spending more time on their French homework than on whatever obscure mathematical nonsense we should have been concentrating on. And yet, and yet… slowly the amount of homework done and the number of people coming to class dropped off as we slowly realised that revising for Applied Nuclear exams might not be as fun, or even as intellectually stimulating, but had to be done by a particular date. Whereas French could wait. And in my case it still is waiting…

There are many expressions used to describe the job of an English teacher in Japan (especially Assistant Language Teachers in public schools and teachers in Eikaiwa English conversation schools) in Friday night drinking and moaning sessions- clown, therapist, paid friend, pet gaijin- and they all have a little truth. Really though, what I am, whether I am working in a company class, a kindergarten or a private language school is an evening school French teacher. It’s not the same as teaching in an African school where your lessons could help drag someone out of poverty, but the fact that the Japanese have reached a comfortable level of life and self-sufficiency in 60 years to the point where they now don’t need to learn English to get candy or stockings from the occupying GIs and the whole industry has been reduced to a hobby is undoubtedly a sign of progress. Solving the mystery of my own motivation as a teacher in a country that doesn’t really need me, however, could take another four years…

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Business English and ESP, Teaching English in Japan, TEFL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.