How to Learn about School Schedules

For parents of school-aged children and Assistant Language Teachers, school schedules are likely very different from your home country’s education system. The Japanese academic year has a different start and finish, distribution of instructional days, and some events that are uniquely Japanese.

A while ago, I wrote about how educators, whether ALTs and core curriculum educators plan their days, weeks, terms, and months at school. Get your planner ready and take photos of the annual and monthly schedules to plan your syllabus.

Typical school schedules for elementary, junior high, and senior high schools

Bulletins

I teach at a private high school across the street from a public junior high school and next to a kindergarten. Both schools do us the courtesy of printing and distributing a monthly bulletin. These bulletins are commonly titled だより, dayori. Alternatively, you may see some schools have a publication called 日記, nikki, or diary. They feature messages from principals, reports on school events, sporting victories, and visits from community leaders, and often have a table of events for the next month.

What happens if you don't get the memo? Here are some pointers on how to keep track of what is going on at the various schools you are involved with.

School Websites

A widely used utility is the School IT portal with an awkward abbreviation. To get a sense of what ShcIT does you can have a look at the main portal site. I suggest that if you’re not fully literate in Japanese, you may want to translate in your browser. I rely on Google Chrome which gives me the option in the search bar to translate a website’s text to Japanese. I often toggle between English and Japanese when my kanji knowledge fails me. Don’t judge me.

Now, SchIT doesn’t turn up individual schools. For that, you want to go to Google Maps and click on a specific school. More often than not, in the sidebar, you’ll see a link to a website - either a SchIT website or a board of education-hosted website with the specific school’s page. There, you’ll see all kinds of information - the 行事予定 gyouji youtei, or schedule of events and glowing praise for students’ achievements in the previous month. You might notice outside school activities such as 校外学習 kogai gakkushu, study trips, 給食終了, kyuushoku shuuryo, end of school lunch programs, 面談, mendan, interviews, all of which alter routine school life.

Besides the events, you get an insight into the school culture when you read columns written by administrators and teachers. (possibly with the aid of translations from Deepl or Google).

So don’t fret if you didn’t get a schedule handed to you personally. Or you got one that you stashed in a file. Somewhere…