I found out a couple weeks ago that ALS had just penned a deal with a solar cell manufacturer here in Matsuyama to provide English lessons for sixty of its employees. The contract has me there for one two-hour lesson each week, for a succession of three eight week classes, twenty students in each.
That’s all well and good; I have lots of experience teaching larger groups of adults. The problem is that the company doesn’t have any specific goals, and I had just less than two weeks to create the entire course. If you’ll recall, this is my first TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) gig, and I’m just over one month into my actual teaching.
I sat down and wrote an outline of what I thought would be useful for them to know and reduced it by what we (I) couldn’t teach in sixteen hours. Ms. Semba and I sat down and hashed out a thing or two that she wanted to include, then we both sat down with Mr. Teshima, and he added a pinch or two of his own, and I somehow managed to come up with a workable set of lesson plans from everything that we all wanted to see. Let me tell you though, that was a seriously stressful time. Not as stressful as hearing I have a job in Japan if I could pack my entire house and move to a foreign country in a week and a half though, so I figured I could handle it.
Well, the first lesson was this Wednesday, and it went pretty well. Ms. Semba was there with me, and I’m very glad she was. No one there really spoke any English (what were you expecting?), so just getting to the classroom would have been a project, as their reception desk was an unmanned phone and a list of extensions (in Japanese). Also, she planned an exercise that we ended up using because they whipped through the material I had prepared faster than I thought they would.
The first lesson was good because it helped me figure out their level of English (higher than I thought it would be), and because I got to meet the students, feel out the class, and get an idea of what things will go over well and what won’t. As I’m sure Shannon (and Shannon) will back me up in saying, every classroom is different, and adjusting your plans to the audience is a crucial part of making a good lesson. My lesson plans are basically cave art at this point, scorched sticks crudely scraped on stone, so I need every little boost I can get. I’ve created handouts and set out goals and exercises, but I’m still not sure they should be called “lesson plans.” Ms. Wood tells me that creating lesson plans will soon be second nature, and I hope that’s true, because right now, just thinking about this project causes me stress.
Anyway, I have another meeting today. Wish me luck. 🙂
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