Classes should be finishing up or finished, and there are only a couple of months of classes left before the end of the school year (a couple of weeks for graduating students). I’d like to introduce a few things for ALTs to be thinking about over the next few months:

• Do you want to make any changes next year?
  If so, now is the time to start thinking about it. Try to take advantage of the holidays to talk to your teachers, either at the bonenkai or in school once the students are off. You have almost finished a year, so you should have a good idea of how you would like to run things next year. It is particularly important to start new classes off on the right foot, so figuring out in advance things like class rules, how homework is going to work, and how your lessons will flow, will allow you to start with a bang in April.
• Start planning any goodbye activities for your graduating students now
  Some ALTs have a special last class, some don’t. Either way it is nice to give your graduating stuents a letter of congratulations, or to take a group photo with each class, or to do something like this year-end activity.
• Use the spring vacation wisely
  Make plans for the spring vacation, particularly if you are not going to be going away. If you have a couple of weeks in school with little to do in terms of classes, come up with some projects. Making a vocabulary curriculum based on the words in your textbook, making flashcards, recording passages from your textbook to give to students, etc. Do something meaningful and share it with other ALTs and JTEs!

I will be here in the office, trying to write a speech for the Mid-year Conference and updating our online presence.

Have a great Christmas and winter break, and I will see you in January at the MYC.

In a nutshell, the following changes will be implemented in Spring 2011:

• the period of integrated study (sougouteki na gakushu) will be reduced by 1/3
• more time will be used for the five core subjects
• 5th and 6th graders will have an hour of English per week

Given the fact that very few homeroom teachers in ES are ready to teach English by themselves right now, this could easily result in a huge increase in the number of ES ALTs.

Personally I think that ALTs are most influential in elementary schools, so this is great news for ALTs. Hopefully not just the number of jobs, but also the range of jobs will also increase, with better pay and stability for experienced teachers…