Your secret weapon as a self-employed English teacher in Japan
The Bulletin (Issue 56)
I don’t think I quite hit the nail on the head last week when I talked about the existential threat AI poses to the human English teacher in Japan (or anywhere for that matter).
Sure, all that I said last week could come to pass, but forgive me if I engage in a little wishful thinking: There will be a future for the English teacher, just not the kind of teacher that you or I might recognise today. And the future could actually be brighter — brilliant even — for the few teachers still left standing after the great cull.
Lemme back up a little.
The last tech scare came in 2020 when the COVID shutdowns happened. Then — do you remember those days, fellow Free Talkers? — we figured out rudimentary tactics to use Zoom and the like. It was a scary time for us self-employed folk. At my eikaiwa, we shut down face-to-face lessons completely, at the time we had no idea how long that would be for (it ended up being about three months for us). If folk didn’t follow us online, we faced going out of business in a hurry. The motivation to come up with something that would keep our students engaged in learning English — and happy to pay us — was strong and urgent.
Over one weekend, we decided to go with a three-pronged approach — a 20 minute live one-to-one Zoom lesson, coupled with two self-study items — 15 minutes of work by the student on their textbook (created by us) and a remaining 10 minute-or-so video, also created by us.
We found the textbook handled the boring but necessary repetitive practice the students needed, the video handled the modeling of vocab and grammar (boring to the teacher because it was so repetitive), leaving the face-to-face teaching just to check the students really were getting it, to add a bit of the human touch to motivate the students — aka to have a bit of fun.
What we found was the students were learning as well or better (in pure language-acquisition terms) than before and we were enjoying the teaching side more. When the crisis was over we discovered no one had quit our school, we’d even gained a handful of students and about 15% of students wanted to stay with the online programme instead of coming back to 100% in-person lessons.
All well and good you may think, but what does this all mean for your teaching and AI? Here are my thoughts:
You could offload most of the repetitive teaching and student practice elements to AI.
But AI alone will never be enough. No matter how excited mega-tech companies and their fan boys get, there’s something uniquely social that you only get from human interaction.
Don’t fear having fun in your lessons — in fact, focus on that. Fun, by that I mean real social interaction (rather than the poor imitation that is social media), is the one thing that may keep you in work.
What do you think? Leave a comment if you think I’m onto something here, or if I’m way off base, I and your fellow Free Talkers would love to know.