Let's Japan.org Debunking Eikaiwa and Ramblings in Japan

G.communication has limped along since it scraped up the remains of NOVA in 2007 and tried to put it back together. Sales have not been good and complaints have been piling up, so management apparently decided to write a memo about it. Mr. X in the forums provides a copy of the memo making the rounds.

Recently a number of complaints have been received by Head Office from students regarding their lessons. They feel no sense of progress and that their lessons are monotonous and failing to support their advancement. They claim that instructors seem to lack a sense of responsibility towards their own self-improvement, and as a result make little or no effort to increase the quality of their lessons. They will not re-sign if such a situation continues.

As you are all aware, student motivation is closely tied to a sense of progress in their learning. The current level up rate is very low, reflecting a very slow rate of progress. This means that expectations are not being met. In order to reverse the trend and address the negative impact it is having on students' decisions to continue learning at our schools, instructors need to be more conscious of student progress, and more conscientious and resourceful in regards to facilitating level up, and in developing their own professional skills and ability to keep students motivated and improving.

Instructor responsibilities include:

Lesson preparation - instructors should consider past records and study histories as much as possible in order to identify the specific needs of each student and make the best choice of lesson material and lesson objectives based on this.

Lesson quality - lesson stages should be tailored to meet student needs. Techniques and focuses should be selected and adapted throughout the lesson to maximise the benefit to the students' communicative competence as they progress through the unit.

Direct feedback - specific feedback should be given at all appropriate stages of the lesson, and in addition specific advice for improvement should be given verbally to students at the end of every lesson. Students should be aware of their own progress through the feedback they receive, and be able to recognize the efforts of the instructor to help them raise their level of performance.

Lesson records - entries in student files must be complete. This includes a recommendation, in the form of one or more checked boxes, or ideally a written comment. Written comments should be professional, objective and useful. They should be written in clear, simple English.

All of the above must be observed in order to motivate learners and most effectively assist and enable student progress towards the most tangible form of advancement - Level Up.

Level Ups - at every stage in a student's Nova career instructors need to be assessing and responding to the development of student proficiency in relation to the requirements of the next level so that timely Level Up recommendations can be made.

Thank you for your continued efforts,

Human Resource Enhancement Headquarters.

Got that? Business is bad, so the instructors are to blame. Give better lessons, give more feedback, submit neatly-written paperwork. What's missing is any recognition by management of what problems it's facing--aside from those ubiquitous "complaints"--and what plan they have for addressing those problems. It would be nice if management actually told its employees what is plans to do instead of squashing morale by telling instructors to be better.

Despite Sahashi scamming hundreds of thousands of his customers and staff and instructors out of their money, and running the company into the ground, G.communication president, Masaki Inayoshi, seems to believe that the NOVA brand is still salvageable. As far as I can tell, since taking over NOVA, G.communication hasn't put any effort into rebuilding the brand. Neo-NOVA's first and only TV commercial this year recycles the same old NOVA logo and bunny. What could possibly go wrong with reusing the logo and character from a company associated with fraud on a massive scale? At most, G.communication has taken the old NOVA system and its textbooks, slapped a thin coat of paint on it, and hoped for the best. They should have dumped the logo and bunny long ago.

But there's more! Another reader provides more hilarity:

In addition to that sad, morale-degrading fax, theres [sic] other news: `apparently`, staff now will be required TO PAY electricity bills that are in excess!! No joke!! Explains now why theyve [sic] been turning the lights off during lessons.

I don't know what "excess" means here, but if they're turning off the lights to cut costs, this should save NOVA hundreds of yen annually! G.communication has done things on the cheap from the beginning, and now they're scraping the bottom of the barrel for ways to save money. It's a bad sign when you have to pinch your pennies this tightly. Is this what's happening in neo-NOVA? Has G.communication realized that taking over the smoldering wreck of NOVA was a bad idea?