Yet Another Eikaiwa to be Avoided in Japan's Sea of Bad Eikaiwas
Pros
This is the worst English teaching job I've ever had in Asia, and I wouldn't dream of signing a new contract with ALS, even if they paid me double. It does have its pros and cons, but the cons heavily outweigh the pros. Starting with the pros: 1. The work asked of you is actually quite easy. It doesn't require much of any skill, and it's easy to get used to. Your top priority is to just be a smiling and light-hearted performing clown. 2. The schools are well-stocked with games, toys, and teaching supplies. If there's something you need but the school doesn't have, they'll often happily buy it for you. 3. The job is a very easy ticket into Japan. Many other similar companies require you to go to location-specific interviews around the globe and jump through countless hoops. With ALS, I merely did a couple of interviews from overseas via Skype, and I was hired and onboard a few months later. 4. Your salary is paid once a month, and it's always deposited on time directly into your Japanese bank account. 5. If you work at multiple school branches, the company will provide you with a car to get from branch to branch. Just understand you'll be docked 10,000 yen a month for this privilege. Trust me when I say you WANT a car in rural Kanto Japan. I felt sorry for my co-workers who were stuck there without one. 6. Though it can vary greatly from teacher to teacher, the total work hours are less than a standard work week. My schedule hovered around 30 hours a week. That means I had to be physically at school only 30 hours each week. You also get a grand total of about one month paid vacation time per year. That’s nothing special in the teaching English overseas world, but it’s certainly better than nothing. 7. The company provides a Leopalace apartment to all teachers who want one. The company handles all the paperwork for you, such as the contract and utilities. Understand that YOU pay for the apartment and utilities, but the company handles everything on your behalf. 8. The company gave me some "house warming" items to help furnish my apartment upon my initial arrival. Items included bed sheets and covers, a cooking pan, an electric oven, silverware, plates and bowls, etc. A nice little bonus when you're new to Japan and low on cash. 9. Class sizes are usually very small, generally ranging from 1 to 5 students per class. The average class size is about 3 students. 10. Some of the students are thoughtful and will always bring you little gifts like sweets and souvenirs, especially after they traveled somewhere.
Cons
1. Very little info is provided prior to your arrival in Japan and in regards to what you'll actually be doing at your job. Your teaching schedule, your apartment, the age range of the students, the initial training - almost no details are provided. You have to take a leap of faith into the unknown. 2. The child students are extraordinarily bratty and misbehaved, which surprised me considering how uptight the Japanese can be about manners. Get ready to be constantly ignored, talked over, hit, insulted, and just flat out disrespected in most of your child classes. This might be the single worst aspect of the job, as you feel far more like a babysitter than an educator. Dealing with bad and disinterested students every day is exhausting. And don’t expect any sympathy (nor empathy) from the management, as they can get really defensive if you make any complaints about the students. Students are the sacred cash cow after all, so YOU will be blamed for any problems you have with them. 3. The adult students aren't much better, either - to teach, that is. Their English levels tend to be low across the board, and it usually feels like they belong in a class with a Japanese English teacher, rather than in one with a native speaker. Get ready to feel like you're talking to a brick wall, as so many adult students are awkward and have poor conversation skills. My conversations with adult students were usually very one-sided. I usually prefer teaching adults over children, but not so in Japan. 4. When you sign a contract with ALS, you must first undergo an entire weeklong training at the parent company's headquarters in Funabashi (the suburbs of Tokyo). This training period is unpaid, and most of what I was taught and told at the training was useless or completely irrelevant to me when I actually entered the classroom to teach for the first time. All idealistic theory, no practicality. It's also a brutal 1.5 hour commute each way from the guesthouse the company allows you to stay at for free in Yotsukaido to the HQ in Funabashi. That’s a whopping 3 hours a day on top of your training. It’s exhausting. 5. The people in management have virtually no educational background, so it gets annoying when they constantly make suggestions to you on how to improve your lessons. And being Japanese, they can't empathize with you as a foreigner at all. Many of the things they suggest simply won't work for you as a foreign teacher teaching Japanese students. They don’t seem to get that. 6. Many of the schools have open, un-closed-off walls and a window on the door. What this means is anyone outside your classroom can eavesdrop on your lesson or peer into your classroom. This makes you feel constantly on edge, as anyone and everyone can watch your lessons (and they do). There's a perpetual "eyes on you" feeling. Parents can also sit in on your lessons with minimal advance notice. I found this outrageous. The company needs to learn how to say no to parent’s ridiculous requests. 7. Every semester (twice a year), the company has "Parent's Day," which is a weeklong event where parents sit in on your lessons with clipboards in hand to evaluate you as a teacher. This is nerve-racking, as it invites trouble onto you as a teacher. Most of the parents are monolingual with no educational background, so it's borderline insulting to allow them to evaluate you as an educator. And parents will complain about anything under the sun in regards to your classes, so expect lots of unwanted visits from management in the weeks following Parent's Day. You can never predict what the parents will complain about next, but there’s always something new. 8. There's lots of useless paperwork for teachers to fill out regarding students and classes. The most annoying are the "report cards" you have to fill out for each and every student every single semester. Any useful suggestions or criticisms you make (in regards to bad behavior, studying tips, etc.) will almost always fall on deaf ears, as the company doesn't want to potentially lose customers based on your suggestions. What this means is instead you have to write outright lies to please the customers. By no means can you write what you want (or need) to write on these report cards. 9. Trial lessons and interviews, oh how I hate them! On top of your usual schedule, be prepared to do countless free interviews and free lessons for potential customers. In a year and I half, I quite literally did hundreds of these. Probably an average of one or two a week. Often you'll have to come into work early or leave late to do these, greatly increasing their annoyance factor. And sometimes you're only given half a day advance notice, often ruining your plans for the following day. Get prepared to be very pissed off every time you’re handed the dreaded “Trial Lesson” request notice. And it’s gonna happen a lot. 10. The job is extremely repetitive. After only a few months you'll feel like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog's Day. Teaching the same bad students the same boring lessons makes you feel like you're going insane. The game, supplies, and worksheets provided at the school do help, but it's only a matter of time before you exhaust them to death. The schools should consider shuffling students around from teacher to teacher to keep things fresh and to expose students to as many different native English speakers as possible. Both the teachers AND the students would be happier as a result. But of course this will never happen. 11. You will occasionally have to do unpaid extra work during your free time. Why? Because it’s in your contract. Because I worked at multiple school branches, I had to do multiple Halloween parties on multiple Sundays. Sundays and Mondays are your only days off, so having them stolen from you to do unpaid work is downright cruel. I also had to pass out flyers in front of elementary schools and do some English activities at the park – all during my usual days off. You can’t say no when the managers request this kind of extra work from you, either. Just say no and watch all the trouble that follows. 12. Unless you’re one of the school’s VIP teachers, don’t even think about taking a day off from work, even if you’re genuinely sick. Doing so strongly goes against Japan’s obsessive work culture. If you take a day off, expect lots of trouble and passive aggression to come your way. And not only that, you will lose a potential 12,000 yen for every day you take off. You see the school gives you five “contingency” days to take off from work every year, and at the end of your contract you can cash these out if you didn’t use them. That sounds good on paper, but I see it as the company docking me 12,000 yen for simply taking a sick day. So in other words, you can’t take a single day off for any reason without paying for the privilege. 13. Brace yourself for a lot of useless meetings. There's a bi-monthly meeting for all ALS teachers, then one big annual meeting for all ALS teachers, and then an even bigger annual meeting for all teachers working under IB Japan (ALS' parent company). And unless you're lucky enough to be living in the city where each meeting is taking place, get prepared for a long commute (for me usually a 1 to 1.5 hour drive each way). Most of the meetings were simply a time for the company to tell us a few predictable announcements. I never understood why they didn't just email us all this information, rather than forcing us to come to a distant meeting. And these long meetings usually take place before your usual work hours or on your day off. Wonderful. 14. Whenever you complete your contract and leave the company for good, they keep a “security deposit” of 60,000 yen from you to cover any leftover utilities or damage you might have done to the apartment. Fair enough, but it took them a whopping two and half months to finally return that 75% of that money to me via a wire transfer. That’s just way too long. Looking back, my job at ALS was soul-crushing and surely the worst teaching job I’ve ever had in Asia. There are some pros, but they are greatly overshadowed by the cons. ALS is yet another company to add to the “bad eikaiwa” list. Only someone who hasn’t seen how many better English teaching jobs there are in Asia could think working for ALS is a good job.