I taught as an "assistant language teacher" in a Japanese high school for 5 years. "Assistant language teacher" means you generally have no qualifications or e

I taught as an "assistant language teacher" in a Japanese high school for 5 years. "Assistant language teacher" means you generally have no qualifications or experience, but you are a native speaker of the language :-) Your role can be anything from sitting around doing nothing all the way to taking on a full set of teaching responsibilities. My job luckily tended to the latter. In my first year of teaching, my colleagues had a meeting that I wasn't invited to. After that meeting, every time I bumped into one of them, they "casually" gave me a tip on how to improve my teaching. Literally, "Hello X-Sensei. How are you today?", "Hello Mike-San. I'm fine. If you do Y in your class, I think it would be good. What do you think?". Obviously they had brainstormed ways for me to improve and then dished them out to each person. Amazing team. I was so grateful to them because it was the beginning of how I could start to improve as a teacher. As you say, there are so many things to learn as a teacher. Even in the 5 years I did it, I felt that I managed to get to a competent level, but I was nowhere close to the really great teachers in my school. It is a very deep subject and the idea that it can't be taught is ridiculous in my eyes. One thing that Japan does with "assistant language teachers" is that usually they teach together with another teacher in the classroom. You are really supposed to be assisting (potentially just modelling language), but often they allow you to lead the class. And if they are happy with what you are doing, they may no longer show up any more and trust you to handle things. This was a such a ridiculously good way to learn how to teach, for me. I taught together with 10-15 different teachers in my 5 year term (teachers in Japan move to different schools at least every 5 years, so you cycle through colleagues rather quickly). Each teacher taught me something new (even the bad ones :-) ). I'm a programmer by training, and I am back to programming again. I like teams that do pair programming frequently (although it is difficult since I work in a timezone 9 hours shifted from my colleagues). Both with teaching and with programming, I think the idea of spending your first few years doing a lot of pair programming or team teaching is really valuable. I wish schools had the budget to do it.