randomwisdom.com

I recently got an email from one of my supervisors informing me that my prefecture, Miyagi, has decided to switch from hiring assistant language teachers provided by JET to hiring ALTs via a private company, on a "trial basis". It would appear the prefecture is in a bit of a financial quandary, and they've decided to "clean house". While this only applies to senior high positions (and only new hires, meaning nobody is going to lose their job), it's a bit sad that they have to resort to measures like this to balance their budget.

How is a private ALT different than a JET ALT? Well, the truth is there isn't any real difference. Private ALTs only come to school on days when they are needed, which means that you don't have to pay them during spring and summer vacations. In theory, administrative costs from managing all the senior high ALTs centrally get reduced, though I'm not sure how. And finally, you don't have to supply them with housing because they're not employed directly by the schools or the government. It sounds like a great deal on the surface.

But there are some problems that the central government seems to be ignoring. The biggest problem will be psychological support. It sounds stupid, but hear me out. JET provides lists of foreigner language teachers who all work in the same area. It gets damn lonely in the inaka and sometimes it's necessary to speak to someone else who speaks English natively, just to stay sane. If communication between JETs and private ALTs is mismanaged (considering the current administrators can't even get it together enough to unite the Sendai city and Miyagi prefecture contact lists), the support network of other foreigners will be effectively cut in half for both groups. And we're already spread quite thin as it is. And ALTs who go a bit crazy from being stuck on a small social island tend not to recontract for a second year, or even break contract early and run home. I can pretty much guarantee with this plan that retainment rates are going to plummet. And in the end, this winds up costing the government more money-- plane tickets to fly people here aren't free. But worse of all, it leaves us with a dearth of experienced ALTs and a vacuum of continuity.

To be fair, I don't know why they hire so many senior high ALTs in the first place. In Japan, high school students are divided up into two groups. One group gets into a preparatory high school and spends three years getting ready for college entrance exams. Since the English component consists of a multiple-choice grammar test with no speaking requirement and a pitiful listening component, these students have little use for an ALT. Perhaps 2 percent of these students will become English majors; a quarter of those will study abroad and finally learn how to speak English, maybe half will have a good teacher in their Japanese university and learn to speak English passably, and the rest will go on to become English teachers in senior and junior high. The second group is in an agricultural or trade school. This is the group that will grow up to be farmers, factory workers, and 7-11 clerks in their hometown, and have no reason to use or study English. The second group doesn't need ALTs, and the first group can't make use of them unless there are massive changes in the examination process and secondary education structure. I've come to realize that as a foreigner, I will never be in a position to make these changes even on a local scale.

Miyagi, along with most other prefectures in Japan, would be better off taking those senior high ALTs (along with more than a few of the junior high teachers) and assigning them full time to elementary schools. Why? Because that's where we do the most good. English education in junior and senior high schools is a broken parody of language instruction. It's so bad that after a year of junior high most students just give up on being able to speak English, ever. And their "solution" is shoveling in handfuls of "assistant teachers" who are undertrained and have no authority to even teach classes on their own, let alone select textbooks or curricula. That said, why would things be any better with the younger grades?

In elementary schools, things are a bit different. There's no textbook and no national curriculum. There is no English component to the junior high entrance exams (thank God), meaning that elementary school teachers don't have to shoehorn grammar points and long government vocabulary lists into their lessons. There are no deadlines that decide what lessons must happen and when. And there's no exam guillotine looming on the horizon. The end result is that English lessons in elementary school are interactive, open-ended, and fun for the students, as well as being less stressful for the teachers. There's no temptation to take shortcuts like memorizing lists of words or teaching obscure grammatical jargon, as there's no point to doing so.

Most of the teachers in elementary school teach all subjects to one class, so they aren't English specialists. But rather than being a problem, this actually prevents situations where the ALT feels like he's stepping on the "real" teacher's toes. The ALT needs the homeroom teacher to help control the class, and the homeroom teacher needs the ALT to actually design and present the lesson. In a junior high or senior high lesson, the assistant and "real" teacher are often at odds, because they have different goals and different abilities: the Japanese teacher is trying to prepare the students for the test, while the ALT is trying to teach the kids to communicate in English. The Japanese teacher ostensibly has qualifications and status as an English teacher in Japan, while the ALT speaks and writes English with more fluency than the JTE will ever attain. This leads to situations in which either the ALT or JTE feel marginalized or even hostile toward each other. In elementary schools there is less overlap of skills and no conflict of interest, so this enmity is generally less likely to exist.

Most likely, this "trial" period will only last a year or two, until the budgetary committees get their act together. But the damage to the English teaching community will already be done.

Yes, there will be jobs here teaching English for a LONG time.

Why would anyone in their right mind replace a perfectly working stock ECU?

First I need to explain Japanese car classifications. There are two tax classes of consumer cars in Japan: normal, with a white license plate, and "kei", with a yellow plate. The "kei" means lightweight; it's designed mostly for people who need a small cheap commuter car, or a small truck for hauling around bags of rice or whatever. Kei cars must fit certain manufacturing criteria: they have to be no larger than 3.4 meters long and 1.48 meters wide, and no taller than 2 meters. These dimensions lead to many manufacturers making a very boxy looking car to maximize interior space. Their maximum engine displacement is limited to 660cc. Finally, they are restricted to making no more than 64 hp. And of course, while all Japanese cars are limited from the factory to go less than 180km/h or 160km/h, keis are usually restricted further; my governor kicks in at about 135km/h with a disorienting and rather abrupt jolt.

The engine size and power ratings dovetailed pretty well until about 1990, when manufacturers started fitting fuel injection and turbochargers to their engines. Those tiny 660cc engines started putting out more than 64 horsepower, and so the manufacturers detuned the fuel and spark mappings and added turbo bypass valves to meet requirements. As a result, the power curves for the cars started to look really weird. Whereas normally the power of a combustion engine usually increases until just before redline, my car hits 64 hp at about 4000 rpm and then just stays there until the 8500 RPM redline.

I figure if I derestrict things it should make 90hp peak quite handily. That might not sound like much power, but considering it's coming from a tiny 660cc 4-cyl engine running regular 87 octane fuel and powering a car about the size of a go-kart, it's enough. And as a nice side effect, no more nanny speed governor either, which means... track days!

According to my buddies, the power restriction is effected through a turbo bypass valve or two, controlled via the ECU. Obviously modding the valve to stay closed all the time won't work, because the stock ECU won't deliver enough fuel and things will go boom. On top of that, I don't know whether the speed governor retards the spark or cuts fuel or both. In short, I don't trust the damn thing. So to make things simpler (ha!) I figured replacing it with a custom fuel and spark computer would be ideal.

There are a lot of cool things about this approach. First of all, I get some hands-on experience building it myself. Secondly, it has a serial port on it so I can hook it to my laptop and adjust fuel parameters and spark advance through software. Of course, it's cheaper than an aftermarket piggyback ECU. On top of that, if tuned properly the economy and emissions may actually be better than stock. If I do the wiring harness properly I can just pull my ECU out and reinstall the stock ECU when it's time to go home. And finally, it's a chance to learn about engines and apply my engineering background to them-- a few weeks ago I had no idea what spark advance or fuel injector pulse width was.

I got ahold of a wiring diagram and have been poring over it (and translating it) for the past couple days. The stock ECU controls two fuel injector banks, two spark plug coils, an idle air stepper motor, and two boost control valves. Information about the crankshaft position comes from what I'm guessing is a variable reluctor sensor, but I don't know yet how many teeth the stock timing wheel has. A good ECU automatically controls how much extra air comes into the engine by means of a valve or stepper motor, which helps when starting cold. As for those two solenoids... they regulate boost pressure, but as of right now I don't understand their default operation... by default they'll restrict boost pressure a lot, which I guess is fine when I'm just starting to tune the engine, but I'll need to get these working properly. There are already stock O2, coolant temperature, and air temperature sensors installed; I believe I'll be able to calibrate those and not have to replace them.

The only other oddball piece of hardware is a wacky throttle position sensor; it has just a switch for idle and a switch for "power". This piece of junk obviously needs to be replaced, hopefully with a junkyard part that I can just bolt on. Hopefully.

I suppose I should give an update on what I've been doing the past couple weeks.

School is finally picking up again, but despite the excessive number of opening ceremonies and introduction speeches they still need a week or so to actually start a normal schedule of classes. And they only stopped classes for the 2 weeks of break, meaning that pretty much all of the students were still here. So I don't really see why we needed all the disruptive ceremonies when we never really stopped or started anything. I guess it's just a way to make all the grown-ups feel important. That and Japanese love ceremonies, rituals, and formal beginnings and endings. There's even a ritual they train people to do before starting their own car, which involves walking around the car, checking under the car for stray children who may be adjusting your manifold, adjusting the seat after sitting down (even if you were the last person to drive), buckling the seat belt, adjusting each mirror, resetting the parking brake, locking the door, clicking their heels together three times, and God knows what else before actually turning the key. It's a wonder any of them ever pull out of their driveways.

I was really worried about the 3rd year teacher who is now teaching the first year students. When I first met him he was very traditional, very rarely strayed from the textbook, and bored his students a lot... but this year it seems like he's a totally different person. He's a lot more approachable, he's telling jokes in class and generally seems to be a lot happier than he used to be. Maybe the stress of dealing with preparing all the third year students for exams was wearing down on him. I don't know what changed, but I hope it lasts.

With as much free time as I've had recently, I've found myself straying back toward engineering projects. I placed an order for some electronic parts and I'm going to build myself an ECU for my car. An ECU is the computer that controls your fuel injectors and spark timing and a few other things. Why am I building such a thing, when my car works already? Well, I'll leave that for the next post.