Seiritsu International Education

Hello everyone! Laurence here.


Being an ALT is a lot more work than it might seem. Of course, your responsibilities change according to the needs of your working place but here at Seiritsu, ALTs do a lot more than planning and teaching classes. Here are a few examples you might find interesting.


One thing that sets Seiritsu Gakuen apart from schools in Tokyo is its international department, for which JETs do a lot of work. We look after international students during excursions and support them as fellow foreigners in Japan. We also take part in important school events, like rice harvesting, entrance and graduation ceremonies, during which we can be in charge of taking pictures or video footage. The JETs are also in charge of overlooking the English Conversation Club, which takes place once a week. This also includes organizing seasonal parties for our club members as well as decorating.



Seiritsu's ECC at Christmas time!


Speaking of speaking English, we also have “English Conversation Lunches” with selected groups of students outside of class. We also help some of the older students practice for important interviews (for college, eiken etc.).


One of the major changes that took place last year was the addition of the extensive reading program to the English department. The books we received had to carefully be cleaned, sorted into levels, coded with coloured stickers and filed into our online database before putting them in the shelves. This was no easy task, as we already have over 600 books in the extensive reading room.


Recently, we have started recording ourselves reading some of these books out loud as well, so readers can follow along as we read the books to them.





I hope this blog post gave you a little more insight in what us ALTs can do. We have to be flexible in order to make it work but it’s these challenges that make our work more exciting – and impactful – in the long run.



See you next month!


Laurence Dubé