News

If bad things come in threes, I suppose my posting must come in threes too. Not that I have bad news, that is.

In fact, there are 2 news items, in a way inter-related. Lets start with the good news. First, my re-contracting confirmation came in. So my third year is locked and loaded. /emote sigh of relief.

On to the other news. A fellow Fukuoka JET I know was denied re-contracting. When I heard this news, I was thrown for a bit of a loop. In JET circles, re-contracting was a sort of unspoken guarantee, provided that you didn't do something stupid like steal, break laws, get a student pregnant etc. As far as I know, this ALT did none of these things, and was in fact a pretty straight-laced guy.

They say that not knowing can make your fears and imagination run wild. So lets follow my imagination and see where it leads.

On the simplest level, ALTs are subject to a performance review. With the expansion of the JET Programme allowing for a 4th and 5th year, I think there was a thought that re-contracting was similarly an unspoken guarantee. After all, why keep an ALT 3 years if you're just going to get rid of him or her in the 4th year? Presumably a 3rd year ALT has built up enough of a presence/goodwill/connections to weather any possible threat of recontract denial.

Balance that with the warnings we've gotten from our Prefectural Advisor (liaison to the Prefectural Board of Education), that recontracting is NOT guaranteed.

So on the simplest level, the High School was not satisfied enough with this ALT's performance, and is opting to get a new ALT. That sucks, but such things are a reality in other jobs, so why not this one.

The next level up is that the school no longer wants an ALT. Our brand of teaching, while spiritually, and perhaps culturally enlightening, is of dubious value to the realities of the Japanese education system, which prizes rote learning via grammar translation method as a method of learning English. This is turn is forced upon High Schools due to the rigorous university exam system. In the end, the Japanese system trains students to pass exams, and not communicate in a foreign language. Presumably, the JET Programme grew out of a need to address this deficiency. So in end, if a High School wants to focus more on preparing their students for an exam, then it makes sense to cut the position of an under-utilized ALT.

This links to the next level up, in which the JET Programme is instituting budget cuts across the board. A major sign of this was the cancellation of the Kobe Recontracting Conference. Now this is a cut I agree with, because in the end it was essentially a giant paid vacation for 6 or 700 JETs. But JET jobs might be on the cutting block as well. I can see a situation where CLAIR, the organization that oversees the JET Programme, sends requests to the various prefectures to cut X number of positions. The prefectures in turn ask their High Schools to see if any of them can do without an ALT. In this case, ALTs at high academic schools, whose focus is to train students to enter high education, are in the most danger, as their jobs become more and more superfluous and their class hours are gradually converted to classes that focus on grammar.

What we might be seeing is the beginning of the end of the JET Programme. Admittedly this is a worst-case scenario. However, it's not out of the realm of possibility that, in light of private companies that are offering the same service to high-schools for cheaper. Who knows where the JET Programme will be in ten-years time? Leaner and meaner? Or gone the way of the dodo?