I had a really fun day at work today. The students in my first class are first time learners of English, and so they are completely my students. Most of the other students at the school have had another teacher and are pretty set in a system of how classes are supposed to run. My new students are getting used to my style quickly because it is the only style they know.
I’ve found that although I speak a lot of English in class, especially with the younger students I can’t do 100% English. Just a word of Japanese here and there can help a lot, and during really tough concepts more Japanese helps a lot. I don’t think I ever speak more than 10% Japanese in a class.
Today with my younger students we were all in a particularly goofy mood. Riko and Yui were trying to imitate every action and word I said, and Itsuki was enjoying crashing into things while acting out English verbs like “fall down”. Whenever Riko and Yui couldn’t imitate my English pronunciation that would just say “bububububu”, and that made me laugh and make them same noise by moving my finger up and down over my lips. That made the other students laugh and everyone was sitting in the classroom doing that and laughing their asses their off.
I was laughing most because I could imagine what their parents might think if they could see us now. I told the students in Japanese what I imagined would happen when they got home today…
“What did you learn in English today?”
“We learned to say ‘bububububububu’ while looking like idiots. Thanks for spending all that money on English lessons!”
The students liked that imaginary situation so much that I think a few of them will probably go home and tell their mom just that. Oh, well. Hopefully their parents will understand.
My last class had only two students because three students were on a field trip. Rather than do a lesson with just two students we just spoke English and played some games on paper. We did hangman, squares, and battleship before time ran out. They didn’t realize it, but they had spoken English the whole time. They really liked the squares game, and it sounded like they’ll be teaching it to their friends at school tomorrow.
We had kind of weird dinner at home tonight. I had bought some yakitori on the way home for Kuniko – she was complaining of iron-poor blood so I got some liver for her to eat. She sent me a message as I was leaving the yakitori saying that she was craving Italian food for dinner, so I made some pasta with lots of asiago cheese and red sauce and opened up a bottle of red wine. So we had a very diverse yakitori and pasta dinner – yum.
