Teacher Water Cooler – Month of November 2025

4 comments

1. My department seems to have a vendetta against hiring non-Japanese English faculty, with the mentality that “the students won’t be able to understand a teacher who can’t speak Japanese.” Yeah not a problem at any other uni I’ve worked at. Not a single Japanese teacher of English I have met, at least not in the age range hired by my uni, does CLT at all. They’re stubbornly stuck on GTM, strict grammar rules, and one-way lectures. Oh and while our language committee is pushing for Japanese placement tests to handle incoming foreign students, they’re simultaneously arguing to eliminate English placement tests for our first years. Make it make sense.

2. Lately I have been asked to verify ChatGPT translations. Then, recently I have found out, that my translations are pushed through ChatGPT for verification on accuracy. Pretty hilarious.

3. I was at the JALT conference last weekend and something happened that I would like to mention.

   I was at a poster presentation being given by a young woman who has been working as a dispatched instructor sent to universities. Her poster was about some of the things that she has been doing in the classroom and I found it quite interesting and her enthusiasm was great.

   However, as you know with poster presentations, they are rather informal with lots of people hanging around and coming and going. So, as I was standing there, kind of out of her sight-line, someone she knew came up to her and they started chatting. This person asked her what she was doing now, and she said, “I’m a professor* at ABC University.”

   It completely floored me.

   I understand that people need to feel important and puff themselves up, but they also need to be honest. Everybody starts out in academia at the bottom and there is nothing embarrassing about it. People won’t judge someone for being early in their career; we’ve all been there. But they will judge someone for lying about their career. The best case scenario for her was that she came off as kind of naive. Worst case scenario was that she comes off as egotistical or an imposter.

   I mean, if you are meeting your friends at the bar on Friday night, OK, fine say what you want, go ahead and brag, but to claim to be a professor when you are at a conference, around people who actually are professors, was pretty shocking. And to be honest, I lost a lot of the good will and esteem that I had for her that she created with her presentation. I walked away not thinking of her as an upcoming professional, but as a chancer and manipulator.

   If you want to work in academia, especially a small field like language teaching in Japan, your reputation is everything. Ruining your reputation is something that can be very, very difficult to come back from.

   *The reality is that she is Teaching Assistant (TA). The use of dispatched teachers to universities is a violation of The Ministry of Education’s (MEXT) guidelines and can cause a university to loose their accreditation. However, universities have discovered a massive loophole. If the ‘professor of record’ listed on the syllabus, etc., is one of their tenured faculty, then the outsourced teacher can be listed as a ‘teaching assistant’. There is a long history in academia, both in Japan and around the world, of using various hiring schemes for TAs, and it doesn’t violate MEXT rules.

   From the TA’s POV they are doing all of the work, but there are a lot of things that I do as the professor of record for the class. They may do all of the teaching, but I still have to write the syllabus, certify their results, and when there is an issue, for example, a student complaint, I have to deal with it. At the end of the day, there is more to university classes than just what goes on in the classroom, and as the professor of record, I am doing a lot of work that TAs are not allowed to do.

4. Has anyone here ever gotten into with someone giving a presentation about claims or something they said?

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