How much assistance?

One of the rather sneaky things that was included in my contract was a clause alluding to "assisting the school with various activities, as they relate to student life and may reflect on yourself and the employer." Now, generally that only means things like eating lunch with the kids, going to one of the school club activities and trying to take part, or helping with checking papers and recording dialogues for the listening tests. The general idea is that since we're Assistant Language Teachers, we ought to assist. Seems fair enough.

But the school I work at his recently had a rather large number of foreign students enrolled here: 3. All of whom have varying levels of Japanese. One of them is fluent. He's been here with his family since he was five or six, and can regularly be seen taunting the hell out of his classmates. Something about his ability to think in another language has made him quite clever in his insults, comebacks and heckling. And his spoken English is probably among the top three in his grade. But the other two have a harder time waiting for them.

One of them is from China, and relocated to Japan last December at the age of 15. Which left him about two months to prepare for the high school entrance exams. Now, if he doesn't pass an exam for one of the schools, his education will pretty much end there. Mandatory school attendance only goes up to age 15. Which would leave him with either trying to find a private school/tutor and studying independently for 3+ years to try and learn enough to pass a high school equivalence test so he could then apply for work/university application, or just giving up and dealing with being an unintelligible unemployable. Which isn't really what his parents wanted. Fortunately, the principal here shows a surprising amount of compassion and arranged, against the recommendation of the school board, for young Mr. Chen to re-take the third year of junior high so he can improve his Japanese to the point where he's got some chance of getting into high school.

The other has grown up in Ghana. She's not facing the same time crunch to learn the language, but is coming from an entirely different schooling background. And since one of her two languages is English, I am more aware of what problems she's looking at. For one, she hasn't had any sort of PC lessons. Most school children in Japan officially start learning how to use a computer sometime around the fourth or fifth year of elementary school. So by the time they get to junior high, they're pretty comfortable with searching for stuff on the internet, tracking down flash movies and games that they shouldn't be accessing at school, and wasting the better part of a class fooling around with the fancy text options in Word. For another, her English skills are pretty much going to stop at a 13-year old level. Her official education will never include any sort of advanced grammar, vocabulary or how to write an essay. She will undoubtedly learn how to write a report in Japanese. Japanese education is rife with reports. The kids are trained from an early age in the finer points of tracking down the most widely accepted facts, memorizing them, and presenting them again in a predesignated order. But there's precious little attention paid to using those facts to support any sort of position.
And as a contentious bastich, it worries me a bit that this kid won't get the training she needs to be able to argue well.

But as an ALT who is scheduled to be in 22 out of 24 possible classes every week, there is a clear limit to how much time I have to help her in. I am contractually obligated to be available for rudimentary English lessons. There's nothing that says I can take time to teach this kid how to organize a paragraph, support her thesis sentence, or even how to use a word processor. And the school system here is primarily concerned with making sure the maximum number of kids are as close to getting above the failure-point as they can. No one is every held back a year because of bad grades here. Everyone moves up, and keeps moving up until they reach a point where they can't pass the entrance exams.

Best case scenario: her Japanese improves enough to let her start passing her other classes, like history, science and math. Worst case: she falls through the cracks in Japanese, gets left at the back of the room and never called on, and is bumped up for the next two years, until she turns 15 and is no longer required to be a subject of and burden on the school system. And there's not much I can do to help.