After a slow Monday I was up with Kuniko early this morning, and I went off to help Miki sensei with some trial lessons for some new students at Nozaki sensei’s place. I picked up a sandwich for lunch and then met Miki sensei at Tsuchiyama station. She drove me to Nozaki sensei’s house, and we set up in the classroom there.
Today we had new students arriving in waves. The idea was for them to get a measure of me, for Miki sensei to get a measure of their abilities, and for me to warm up my little kid teaching skills a little. The day went pretty well, with lots of cute kids coming in. One student is so young she can barely speak Japanese (3 years old). The mother really wants her to have an early start on pronunciation, and so I’m going to be working with her class to play games and have fun with English.
The challenge for me is really just to adjust my English to what the students know. Most of the new students today are studying English for the first time, so they know nothing. They can’t even read or write their ABCs. I was getting a little worried that I had bitten off a bit too much, but later in the day some new students were accompanied by an older current student. The kid walked in there and I felt like he was going to walk on water any minute. Compared to all the other kids his English skills were excellent – I was ready to give him a medal. I have to keep in mind that I am only meeting the new students over the next two days. I’ll have to wait to meet the experienced students until the second week of April.
Also, spending this time with Miki sensei has really helped me understand exactly what is expected and what I’ll be responsible for. Today she mentioned off the cuff that we don’t start with the textbook until May, so I can use the month of April to adjust to the students, play games with them to make them comfortable, and get to know them and their levels of English. I’m glad she remembered to mention that today.
We spent most of the day in the classroom with mothers and kids, and then I got out of there around four. I came home and beat Kuniko back by about 20 minutes. We just had a simple yet separate dinner (she had broccoli – just broccoli – and I had Mexican spiced chicken in a salsa and cheese sauce). Tonight after a little bit we are going to hike to the distant shopping center to burn calories and do some shopping at the home center. I have some gardening I need to do with the warmer weather approaching.
Consider me very late to the party, but who knew that RSS could be so freaking useful. Every day when I use my computer I pull up about 20 websites, and then spend time checking to see if they are updated, reading up on articles in Japanese and English, and basically staying up to date with the world outside my apartment. On a recommendation from someone online I started pulling down RSS feeds from all of those sources, and I’m reading them all on one page with a nice portal RSS/module hub called Netvibes. It looks to save a whole lot of time.
I liked it so much that I went ahead and set up an RSS feed for this site. You can get it here, or by using the button over there on the right side of the page. Have fun, and let me know if you have any trouble with it. I’m still new to this…
