And Sometimes Why

Category: work

  • I’m going to be an English teacher

    I had a kid visit class today that really scared me. Not in a “trenchcoat mafia” kind of way, but in a “holy crap, your existence shakes the core of what I know about how to do my job” kind of way.

    For the first time since I moved to Japan, I met a bilingual Japanese kid.

    He’s six years old, and his English speaking ability is arguably better than my office manager’s (listening unarguably so). He goes to a special school that’s taught all in English, a school which Ms. Semba says “only very rich families can pay for.” He and his classmates are only allowed to speak English while at school, so speaking English is (literally) second nature to him. Neither of his parents speak it fluently, though his mom chopped together a “thank you” when I complimented her son’s language skills, so it’s apparently all learned at school. He says his class is very small, and that makes sense from a practical perspective; if you need to police young’uns’ predilections to speak the same language at school as they do at home, it’s far easier to do if you can count them on your fingers. I’m seriously impressed at the level of dedication his parents have to teaching him speak English well.

    But here’s the thing- if he’s going to be one of my students, what the heck am I going to do with him? The difficulty levels of the books I currently use progress in maturity and English ability in accordance with the average ESL learner, which means that the books I have at his English level are aimed at young adults. While he was in the office today, he spent some time in my classroom with three other kids his age who all barely know the alphabet. I talked to him like I would any American child, and he seemed to have the vocabulary of the average American first grader, which brings me back to my point.

    I’m scared of having him as a student because it means I’ll have to do some serious growing as a teacher. I’ve become comfortable with my role as an ESL teacher, and now I’m going to have to be a “regular” English teacher to two kids (he’s bringing a friend from school) who already speak English.

    I guess this means I’m going to be expanding my repertoire, which is good. It’ll involve more work than I’m doing right now, because I can’t imagine Ms. Semba will spring for any more books, especially for an unusual situation like this. That means I’m going to have to come up with a new curriculum, but I’m not sure where to start. American Language School is an “eikaiwa,” literally “English conversation” school, and the point of all our lessons is English communication, but I can’t just sit and have a chat with a couple of six-year olds.

    I think I have a lot of reading to do. If you’re a teacher with experience teaching language skills to children, do you have any specific suggestions where I should start?

  • My office

    Here’s a video I recently took of the inside of the English conversation school where I teach. 😀

  • When she’s good, she’s very, very good…

    I have one student with whom I’ve been struggling almost continuously since I started teaching English with ALS. (This picture of her is from the school’s Halloween party.) She’s a cute little six-year old, but her parents are a bit older than average, and let her get away with murder at home.

    I’ve seen her hit her mom, and her mother mildly scold her for it, to the daughter’s squealing delight, if that gives you any idea.

    Anyway, because she knows no consequences outside of the classroom, I’ve had to introduce her to the concept inside the classroom. She doesn’t much care for not getting her way all the time, but she’s seemed to pay me more and more respect (or at least lip service) over the last few months.

    Fast forward to today, her first lesson after the school’s winter break.

    She was an absolute angel. She listened to me, she was focused on her studies, she nicely collected and handed me the word cards we were using without being asked, even using “Here you are” and “You’re welcome” without prompting.

    I don’t know what was different for her today, but I hope it happens every day she has a lesson. =)

  • My business card

    English added for your reading pleasure.

    My meishi (name card/business card) has more Japanese than English. How cool is that?
    Even better, I can read 90% of the kanji on it. =)

  • Dispatch Lesson

    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. 🙂