Part 1 - 'Sensei'

If I asked you what you thought of your teachers, how would you reply? Doubtless some would list the usual tired adjectives: strict, kind, good, bad, exasperated. And if I asked you what your teachers thought of you? You may ponder a brief moment, before reflecting that despite a few incidents that shall go without further elaboration, you generally had a good relationship with your teachers, and even if not a model student, your working relationship was at least functional. But what if I asked you if you would like to be a teacher? Almost all of you, I suspect, might declare a heartfelt 'no'. You remember those other students, the ones who made classes a waking nightmare, and that one teacher that couldn't quite cope, and eventually quit after a leave of absence. The horror, the horror.

Compare that to the joys of travel! The freedom to wander the world, new sights to see, new places to explore! If I were to ask you if you wanted to go, and you were to gaze at the office around you, your humble abode, or indeed whatever situation you find yourself in, surely the siren call of the great unknown would reach you.

Thus we come to the crux of the dilemma. One of the best ways to immerse oneself in a foreign culture is to live and work there, and teaching provides a convenient access point to this. But don't worry! You won't be like one of those teachers you remember from school. After all, you'll teach adults, right? But what will you teach? Why, English of course! You speak English, and the whole world needs to know the lingua franca. So look forward to a bright and shiny tomorrow, a dawn without the dull dread of going back to the office, a day where each lesson will be different, surrounded by bright young things who you will lead on their own path to an exciting new future, all the while being immersed in an exciting new culture, sights unseen to see, to go boldly (we are English teachers, remember) where no Englishman has gone before.

OK. That last part may be a bit of a stretch. We English have gone pretty much everywhere. Indeed, not that long ago, we had something of a habit of going to places and painting them pink on the map just to show how very good we were at exploring and, um, helping the locals adjust their way of living to our own. Often in the form of giving us their money. And goods. And people. And land. Regardless, should you find yourself in Japan, you will be in a place that was never under English dominion, and is thusly alien to many of our ways, but still oddly similar in others. Should you find yourself a teacher in Japan, well, there are perhaps a few things you should know that may prove somewhat contrary to my earlier exaltations about life as a teacher. Of course, you would also see that, with most things in life, there are pros and cons, and one mustn't focus on the clouds in the sky to the extent that you miss the fact that some of those silver linings are really rather special.