The Cuckoo's Nest

So, you're thinking of working at NOVA and want to know what it is like. The first question to ask yourself is, "Am I a people person?" No, I'm not asking if you like socializing with your friends. Let's take an imaginary trip to the bus station to find out the answer.

See that guy who has dried vomit on the front of his shirt and keeps snapping his jaws together like a dog that has peanut butter stuck on the roof of its mouth? Would you enjoy spending 45 minutes of quality time alone with him? How about that other guy who, although dressed in a suit, reeks of urine? Or the mentally disturbed woman who carries a bottle of lithium pills in her bag and alternates between shrieking at you and crying? How would you feel about spending your day with them? Oh, and . . . almost forgot . . . they don't understand very much English, so speak slowly, be patient and all that.

In case you were wondering, we weren't really at the bus station. We were at one of the three NOVA schools in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The two guys are (or were when I was working there) regular NOVA students. The woman was a Japanese staff member. Lithium, for those that may be unaware, is a powerful antipsychotic drug used to treat conditions like bipolar affective disorder. How do you feel about spending five days of your week with people like this? To be fair, they are not typical of the students that you will teach, but there are enough of them that you will probably have to deal with at least one person like this (or weird in an entirely different way) nearly every day.

For example, there was the woman who would pick scabs off her head and eat them during lessons. She would also fall asleep in class at the drop of a hat. Some teachers would wake her up, but I sure as hell never did. There was the 20-year-old junior-high-school dropout whose sole interests were getting plastic surgery on his face and stalking pop singer Maki Ohguro. His dream in life? To blow up the world. Then there was the woman that was stalking some obscure French tennis player around the world. That was her reason for studying English. Foreign travel. She always carried around these huge Kermit the Frog dolls. She took private lessons and would seat the Kermits in the empty chairs. Freaky stuff. If you are too nice to the weirder students, you may end up with a stalker of your own. I had a couple, and a number of my friends did as well. You have been warned: Most normal Japanese people do not plunk down three months salary to go to an eikaiwa school.

There are, of course, some very nice people, too, people that you may enjoy. On average you will probably see one of them each day, as well. The rest of the lot? They all just blur together when you teach seven or eight groups of up to three students every day. During your ten-minute "break" between classes, you are expected to write pertinent comments about the progress of the students in your previous class (try thinking of how you would evaluate the above examples) and find the files for your next lesson (good luck here). You may also be asked to do demonstration lessons and other sales-related duties in this time. Most people are pretty wiped at the end of a day like this.

What can you do to make things easier on yourself?

One of the most important factors (the biggest that you have any control over) is the school you work at. Put very simply, if you are placed at any school that has the word "honko" in it or has more than two trainers, transfer immediately to a smaller one. A "honko" is a huge branch that will often have upwards of 40 teachers, five or six trainers, and thousands of students. Why is this a bad thing?

Teachers: This is where problem teachers are sent. Too many student complaints? Send that teacher to Shinjuku Honko. A 46-year-old teacher keeps hitting on a 17-year-old high-school student? Send him to honko. An antisocial psychopath that can't get along with anyone? You get the picture.

Trainers: While I will be the first to admit that someone has to do the paperwork and run the school, there is no need to have six of these people in one place. While you're busy teaching eight classes a day, they spend their time doing more important work like smoking, reading the newspaper, or coming up with "innovative ideas." Every three months or so, some new trainer gets it into his or her head how to improve the already terrific NOVA lesson (no, not lessons&emdash;lesson).

The teachers will then all undergo a one-hour training session on how to use the great new idea at the end of which they will be told, "This is the way it's going to be from now on." An example of an "innovative idea"? Throwing a ball to the students when you ask them a question. You may have read about this same "teaching technique" in a story about Geos on this website. I do not know which school came up with this revolutionary "idea" first, and it doesn't really matter, but the thought of actually stealing it from another--that's pathetic. Anyway, this revolution in language teaching lasted about three months until it was replaced by the next goofy one.

You want to be a trainer? Go ahead and do it if you want to. Someone has to. Just don't buy into the program and always keep in mind that your job is to make everyone else's job easier, not harder. Did you get placed in a huge school? Transfer to a smaller one. No, not just any school&emdash;work overtime somewhere for at least a day before you decide you want to move there.

Staff: This is one area in which smaller schools are often worse than larger ones. The primary job of the Japanese staff is to sell lesson packages to students.

Allowing the school to function by such means as printing a correct schedule of classes and things like that is an afterthought, if it is considered at all. Because more potential customers walk into the bigger schools, the more competent staff members are placed there.

Our bipolar friend, on the other hand, was sent to the smallest of the three Shinjuku schools where she was kept away from any potential customers. Her job? She was thekoshitanto, the staff liason with the teachers. Putting the one staff member who could not speak English at all&emdash;and was mentally unstable to boot&emdash;in charge of intercultural communications was not a recipe for success. I was the only teacher that knew Japanese, so my job was to translate her shrieks for the others.

So, what, you may ask, is the moral to our story? NOVA is a great way to get a visa. They will hire pretty much anyone. No, you do not have to be white. You do not even have to be a native English speaker. One of the trainers at Shinjuku Honko when I was there was a Filipino woman who claimed (rather vehemently) to be Canadian yet constantly mangled English idioms ("A thousands yen? That's highway murder!") and trilled her R's.

If you have a passport from a country where English is spoken, you can get a job. Just be aware of what you are getting yourself into. And it helps to have some sort of plan for getting out, otherwise you may end up like poor Jack Nicholson at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. That is, if someone is kind enough to put you out of your misery.

A former teacher