I just had a thought. If software companies had stopped developing new OSs after LOTUS123 and instead just focused on patching up that OS year after year...
...the resultant system would look an awful lot like grade-school English education in Japan.
I'm always thinking about the brokenness of the system, but I had a meeting on Tuesday that brought a certain aspect of the system into sharp focus for me. Basically it went like this: teacher A and administrator B had a disagreement. B wanted A to advance through the next chapter in a certain way under a certain timeframe, and A had a problem with that.
So far, I'm on A's side: teachers are hired with an implicit amount of trust in their abilities and they shouldn't be micromanaged in such a way.
A had a problem with that because he wanted to do every page in the textbook.
Now I'm confused, because I was in the exact opposite position last year. I was trying to skip over swaths of pages that I didn't think were important for the students, and my boss was in strict disagreement with me.
B, upon hearing A's reasoning, exploded in a rage and shouted at him in front of all of us, "Think of the students needs, not your own!"
Now I'm jotting happy faces all over my agenda 1) so that I don't have to make eye contact with anyone, and 2) because B's unjustified shouting down of another teacher was, at least in content, correct. A wants to do every chapter of the textbook because there are x number of pages in the textbook and, not coincidentally, x classes in the school year. As x=x, any skipping of pages will have the end result of a textbookless lesson at the end of the year for which the teacher in question would have to make up completely from scratch. And he didn't wanna.
Making lessons is hard as a full time teacher. I failed all the time last year to balance lesson-making time with my busy teaching schedule (which, incidentally, was ridonkulously busier than any of the teachers at my current school). Planning a good lesson takes at least an hour (if your head's clear), and often more if you want to do more than just talk at the students for 50 minutes. It's easy to fall onto the carefully balanced crutch of the textbook, but if you spend too many years there you might fuse to it like, I think, A did at the meeting earlier this week. He's almost incapable of thinking about his job as a teacher in the traditional sense: someone who knows a good deal about a certain subject and being an adult, who makes it his full-time occupation to transmit the best of his knowledge to the up-and-coming generation. He's fallen into a habit--either of his own volition or because the system is set up in such a way as to force all but the strongest-willed into it--a habit where his job is to show up at x:00, do page xx to page yy in textbook zz, and to spend the majority of his time keeping records and grading things to ensure his students are, hopefully, increasing their grades to a level sufficient to enter society.
This is the kind of teacher the principal wants him to be, though from time to time teachers will be subject to a pep-talk, or to a mandatory extra workload, to remind them that they're not just paper pushers, pushing class after class through an education mill until their bodies are exhausted and their brains consider creative work to be a time-stealing nuisance.
There are only a few strong-willed teachers left. The system doesn't want strong-willed people; they buck the system. The system wants the scared and fearful, who will work their evenings and weekends away on non-class-related paperwork and grading that will keep things running much as they have been. Personally, I could afford to be much, much better. I'm trying all the time, but it's life--it's a struggle between motion and sleep and sleep will have its due. I'm lucky to be inspired by a few good friends, Yorkii and Paul, who are always on the move, creatively, in the EFL field. Hopefully you have someone in your professional or personal life to look up and aspire to as well. It's an extra bit of energy that, I think, will have made a great difference in my life once things are said and done.
