No longer getting anything done in class with my JTE
This is mostly a long rant.
I've been working with the same JTE at elementary school for five years now and I've been encountering a growing problem.
Aside from the fact that my JTE is in his late 60s (and all of the hearing and memory problems that accompany that) he seems to suffer from a sort of restlessness when it comes to doing things in a tried and trusted way. He is constantly tweaking things and thinking up useless additions to lesson content on the fly; bloating the lessons so we get nothing done.
Does anyone else experience this with their JTE?
This usually happens at the start of every school year and we're now at the point where we're not getting through any of the textbook content, activities or exercises.
We're spending 20 minutes on A3 'reflection sheets' that he's formatted to death so they're illegible and are impossible for the students to figure out how to write on. He's added lined paper on the back of them to practice their writing which takes far too long. We're at the point where he's getting them to write sentences that we haven’t studied because it’s taken priority and he knows how much time it will take. He's getting the kids to reflect on lessons where they haven't actually studied anything. He'll often START the lesson with the reflection sheet and justify it by saying "it takes time".
He's written up a 'rulebook' of how he wants the kids to behave and loves his creation so much that he'll spend 5-10 minutes having them read through it when one kid steps out of line.
And then, as many of you who use One World Smiles textbooks will be familiar with, there is the dreaded Jingle Corner. What is supposed to be a 1-2 minute exercise turns into 10-15 minutes of playing in full on the slowest setting (and pausing for repetition) both of the excruciatingly long songs (chants?) that the 5th and 6th grade textbooks contain towards the beginning. The entirety of both of the ‘songs’ is just a list of words from A-Z repeated over and over. That’s it. For some reason he thinks that spending all of that time repeating the same 52 words every lesson (70 lessons a year) will improve their English and I just don’t get it. I’ve tried telling him that we need to stop with this, no other ALT using these textbooks I know does it, it wastes time and the kids are so bored… but he just gave me a very roundabout "no".
In my lessons without him I'll completely bypass this section and just have the kids say the two words (for example "A, a-a-a, actor, ant"), then maybe have them think of any other words that begin with that week's letter and leave it at that.
All of these things that he's periodically decided to start adding to his lessons are causing us to get through absolutely 0 content. The kids are no longer experiencing any learning in the classroom during his lesson. I'm left on my own to blaze through what we've failed to cover at mach speed on the following day when he's at a different school. My solo lessons now invariably have 1.5 to 2 lessons worth of content (sloppily) crammed in.
The problem is that towards the end of the year we run out of time to cover all of the content so I'm given make-up lessons sometime to the tune of 2-3 per class in a week - disrupting my ad-hoc schedule with 1st, 2nd grade and special needs classes. Of course I don't mind extra classes here and there, but for such an avoidable reason that he's created himself feels like a kick in the teeth for me.
Of course, he doesn't see it like that and thinks he's kaizen-ing, whilst stressing out and not understanding that by constantly tweaking his own system he's making everything more time consuming and difficult.
For context my JTE spoke no English when he took on the role five years ago after working as a big-wig in various 課長 and 校長 positions in the town over his career. He has no English teaching qualifications either. He effectively asked for the job as a step down before retiring, was told "here you go" and now has got way too settled.