Your Worst Personal Eikaiwa Experiences

What bad experiences have you had working in eikaiwa?

Note: Originally posted on the message board on September 22, 2001.

I've had a few bad experiences. Inheriting trashed apartments, Managers changing the time I was supposed to come in to work from 1 pm to 10 am without telling me, then calling the main supervisor saying I was being insubordinate and later and finding all this out from the very pissed off supervisor rather than the manager who even greeted me with a big smile and "Ohayo Gozaimasu!" like nothing was wrong when I walked in the door. Whoa! How's that for a run on sentence? But I think the worst, and funniest was a guy named Hiroyuki. He was a teenage young man who wanted to look like a rock and roll star, which he interpreted as, "Never take a shower or wash your clothes." He left a wake of odor behind him that lasted for hours. It even seeped into my clothes and I smelled like his B.O. riding home on the train! It was that bad. I couldn't eat for hours before any class with him for fear of retching, or afterwards because I had no appetite. I tried to talk to the manager about it but of course she did nothing In fact, she tried to get him to renew even though I'm sure he's directly responsible for at least 5 people who didn't renew for fear they might be in the same building as him! I even tried to carefully talk to him about it but to no avail. Boy did I get reamed for that when the manager found out, too. "Why you insult our students? Why you call them smelly?" I thought, "Oh yeah, I called all of our students smelly to their face. Yep that's me. Don't you have an appointment with your omiai so you can get married and you can sit at home eating curry bon bons on the couch all day and become a fat, bored, jaded, neurotic housewife like half of our students rather than bother me with this petty #####?" Oh well.

Actually the WORST incident I ever had wasn't even in Japan. It was teaching at in int'l school in the USA. We had this one guy I'm convinced was completely insane, and his parents didn't know how to deal with him so they just shipped him off to English school in America so they wouldn't have to deal with him. He freaked out the first day because he saw the smoke detectors and started screaming they were cameras and "they" were watching him. But the coups de grace was about a week later when we had a 10 minute break between classes and he held this girl in a headlock and put a knife to her throat. Everybody was trying to calm him down and get the knife away from the both of them. It was a tense situation for about 20 minutes till the cops showed up and threatened to blow him away if he didn't put the damn knife down. Amazingly, one of the cops spoke his language and he understood and chilled out. Within hours he was on a plane back home and his visa permanently revoked. That's all I got. Whadda you got?
The Shag-meister

Though my worst experience has already been put up as a story on this site (Crash Test Teacher), there is a more common form of torture which often takes place at eikaiwas every week. It is called many things in many circles, but I used to refer to it as "PL Shotgunning" (PL= Private lesson) and is in direct reference to the art of shotgunning a can of beer.

You often have students at eikaiwas that either have lesson tickets (NOVA) about to expire or other private students that are "Off to study/work abroad" in less than a month, but still have 12 50-minute private lessons (AEON) on their contract. Therefore, what does your manager do? Refund the student's money? HELL NO! She has them come on a slow day such as a Tuesday morning and teach them for 4 (YES! FOUR!) straight lessons for three weeks!

"Big deal!" you say? I teach six, seven and eight classes a day! Haven't we all? But, have you ever attempted to have a conversation with ONE person, non-stop for three SOLID hours? Think about it. Where in your day to day life at any time are you required to continue speaking to someone in a stream of discussion for more than, say, five minutes? Even when you go out for drinks with your closest mates you take the time to pause, look around the room, sip from your glass, go to the toilet, compose your thoughts and continue chatting. Sure, conversations in "normal" situations can go on all night, but they are leisurely paced affairs. Sure, a hand-job can be a pleasant thing also, but most people would scream "Uncle" before the first half hour was up. And that is exactly what many teachers are asked to do with these demented shotgun students, give them a three hour conversational hand-job. Again, this is a common form of torture that I experienced and many other teachers have gone through it or will at some point in their work with the eikaiwas. Worst days of my life? Not really, there were many others that could top them in the humour or shock department, but I still get the kind of down-to-your-bones ache (like you get when you realize that you have a fifty page term paper to hammer out in one night and you still can't get past the opening sentence) just remembering the start of days like that.
-Bob