The good points of being an English visitation teacher

After moving to Japan nearly two years ago I started working as an English teacher for children. By now, I am working as an English teacher for three different companies which are all totally different. Some I enjoy more, some I enjoy less.

The first place I ever started working at was a position as foreign visitation teacher at an eikaiwa for children. The ages there are between three and twelve years, but the kids are in groups depending of their English level. Usually they are taught by a Japanese teacher and twice a year a foreign teacher comes to the classroom and they can try out what they have learned. This foreign teacher is me.

There are some points I really like about my work there, which I want to tell you about in this post.

Less preparation

The courses have mainly four levels – kids, elementary, intermediate and advanced – which I get to know before going there. The things I need to do during class are nearly the same for the three upper classes and only differ significantly for the 'kids' class. I ask them easy questions, introduce my country, join in the usual class topics, play one or two games, and sing some songs and do dances with the smaller class.

It is always the same, so I don’t need to do any preparation anymore, because you get used to this cycle after a few weeks.

Every time new faces

Because I am visiting different classes I always get to know new students. This is quite interesting because I can get in touch with many different kinds of characters – not only the students, but also the teachers. Some of these interactions are pretty nice because they are very interested or have a high language ability or are just super nice to talk with. Some are the completely other way, but this is also a good way of learning for a fresh teacher such as me.

Every time new places

Being a visitation teacher means always going to new places. For someone like me who likes to see more of the country and enjoys discovering new areas, this is a really nice opportunity. Classes are usually in the afternoon, so you can go earlier and take a look around before you have to go to work. Sure, sometimes the schools don’t have interesting spots around them, but I already had to travel to Odawara, Sakuragicho in Yokohama, and other cities where you can easily spend some time walking around. I also found some nice places I would have never visited on my own.

As you can see, being a visitation teacher here in Japan has some good points. But for sure, this is not all. There are also dark sides which I will talk about in another post.