Overworked, Underpaid, No Appreciation - Avis employé Instructor Model Language Studio

Great place to be working at

Great place to be working at pretty much all the time

Most materials and lesson planning is done for you, it actually has time dedicated to training new teachers, the other teachers and area managers are nice, and the dress code is very relaxed for Japan.

Honbu is on a completely different planet. Whenever you're not interacting or actively at the main office, work is fun and relatively good. But the moment you realize you don't have any craft supplies for the lesson or that there's not enough time to plan for lessons, even if you come in an hour early, you start realizing how broken the entire system is. The main advice I got when I first joined was to ignore the lesson plans because 80% of the time, you won't have the materials you need and the kids won't want to do it. The textbooks are being updated, but even the updated ones feel cheap and out of date compared to other textbooks. And don't even get me started on the lessons. Between all the levels and colors and the rotatations and exceptions? If you're a first year teacher, you'll have about 10-15 different lesson plans to read and follow each week, and each one is NOT short. Breaks are defined by the end of one class until the start of the next. Kids are allowed into the classroom 5 min early, so it's automatically a 55 min break. You also need to be READY for the next class by then, so more like 45 if you're experienced and 20 if you're a new teacher. And if a parent wanted to talk to you or came to pick up late, lucky you gets a 10-minute lunch break! And these problems have been voiced to management multiple times as the reason class attendance is dwindling. One teacher who honbu actively dislikes has the most popular classes in the Yokohama-region and it's because she basically throws the lesson plans out and makes her own. But rather than seeing that and asking her for advice to make the other classes higher quality, they get upset about how she decorates her classroom. Meanwhile, while all of us are making suggestions for basic fixes to make our classes better, Honbu announced they wrote a book for teachers who AREN'T us to use our methods in their own classrooms. And like, cool, I guess... but no one ever has paint but half of the crafts require it? What are we doing about that? I also had a lot of personal issues with honbu itself and how they talked to and treated me, the other teachers, and the Japanese assistants. They fired several Japanese staff who had been there for years and who basically kept their studios functioning. Meanwhile, they hired back staff who were physically and verbally abusive to students and staff because they were shorthanded.