My duties as an Assistant Language Teacher were, as one might guess from my title, centered chiefly around teaching. I taught all grades at the elementary and junior-high school levels, but most of my time teaching was spent at junior-high schools. Each semester, I was assigned to a different junior high school, and I worked at my assigned junior high school every weekday except for one, in which I would go to one of the junior high school’s feeder elementary schools.

My teaching responsibilities at the junior high school and elementary school varied greatly. At the junior high-school level, my job title of Assistant Language Teacher described my duties aptly: I worked as an assistant to a junior high-school English teaching staff. The capacity in which I helped varied with the teacher and the grade. Some teachers, wary of the standardized tests that students must take regularly, asked me to help teach the grammar that would appear on these tests. In this case, following the standard curriculum, my role was primarily a support role. During a typical class, I would stand by the English teacher while she explained the target grammar in Japanese. After the explanation, we would perform a dialogue featuring the lesson’s target grammar. Next, the teacher would give the assignment of the day and leave the students to work quietly. I would then walk around the class and help any students who needed help. Outside of class, my duties included grading papers, making lesson worksheets, and writing dialogues and speeches using the target grammar.

In contrast to the structure of my role at the junior high-school level, my duties at the elementary school level were very defined very openly. In many cases, the elementary schools I visited had never had an English program, not to mention an English proficient teacher. Unsure of how to approach English teaching, many of my elementary school teachers acted as assistants and left me to run the lessons. I found managing classes was difficult in the beginning, with my limited Japanese and the students’-and teachers’-limited English. I was solely responsible for what to teach and how to teach it, and compared to my role at junior highschool, my responsibilities at elementary school were infinitely more challenging. By the same token, however, my work at elementary school was much more rewarding. My Japanese improved phenomenally every time I went to elementary school, since the only English I spoke was the set of basic phrases that I taught in my lessons. In addition, I learned by trial and error what activities worked and what activities didn’t-that talking for more than twenty seconds to six-year olds will bore them to death, and that jumping and dancing in front of sixth graders at the pinnacle of their elementary school coolness will only elicit very, very cold stares.

Besides my work teaching, my duties as an Assistant Language Teacher extended beyond the classroom and into the community. I had the opportunity to teach a weekly adult English class for the town’s international friendship association. In the class, I met a variety of very interesting people, from a retired jet fighter pilot devoted to ballroom dancing, to a designer of tissue packaging. My presence in the class, ostensibly to teach English, was as much a learning experience for myself as it was for the students. Talking to the students in the class, many of whom seemed to have a better command of English than I did, I had a lot of very involved conversations about Japanese culture and customs, conversations I couldn’t have with most other Japanese people because of my limited Japanese language ability.