That’s That

I sent off the letter to the Sakai City Board of Education today saying I did not intend to re-contract. I hadn’t ever really meant to stay longer than a year but even still it felt kind of momentous. I’m a bit sad that my entire time will be spent at the one school. One of the things that I was really looking forward to on the JET Programme was the variety. Instead I’ve been stuck at the same school since I got here. I was told that I would occasionally go off to teach at primary schools but that never seemed to eventuate. I’ll press my liaison at the Board of Education in my next email about it but I don’t hold high hopes of anything coming out of it.

In some ways I’m sure I’m lucky to be at one school. There is a sense of continuity to it that is reassuring if nothing else. I have a desk I know will be the way I left it on Friday when I come in on Monday. I get to see progress in the students I teach (in theory). I get to learn the students’ names (in theory). But given that I teach at a technical high school with students who aren’t going to have much use for English I can never totally escape the feeling that I’m wasting my time here. I don’t know if the situation would really be different even if I were at an academic high school but that’s part of what’s so frustrating about being at one school for the entire time: I won’t ever know. Well, at least I won’t know now that I’ve told them I’m not coming back. JETs are only placed at Ichiko for one year maximum so if I had accepted their offer to re-contract I know I would have gone to a different school. But what if I’d hated it? And didn’t I go to uni for six years so I could go off and be a lawyer? Or at least something more degree-related than teaching the future factory workers of Sakai what ‘bloke’ means?

I’m about halfway through my time as a JET and I have mixed feelings about it (as you can probably see). Being in Japan with a full-time job has been great. Working somewhere so close to Minoh is fantastic (travelling one and a half hours to work and then back one and a half hours each day might not seem close but considering I could have been posted in any part of Japan it’s close). But I certainly haven’t felt the professional development I expected. I’ve had some pretty lame jobs before. I worked in a library before doing this. And even there, mired in local government bureaucracy, I could still feel like I was being useful. Here I just feel like I’m taking up tax-payer money that could be better spent on a new coat of paint for the place. Not to mention the frustration of knowing that there are schools out there that don’t have JETs but with more capable students. Why am I where I am?