Yesterday I taught a class for the new production workers at our company. It is a monthly class that I do all year round, but this time was a little different – I taught it alone.
Our production workers join our company right out of high school. We usually hire 30-40 promising young people and they spend almost a year training them in various skills including welding, steel work, electrical wiring, and more. They also receive training in English, because we have plenty of overseas projects and occasionally our workers are sent to a customer’s railway to do maintenance, repairs or retrofits.
The job of teaching English to the workers falls to the youngest Human Resources staff at the time, and Mr. Yamada (a second year employee and currently the “new guy” in HR) teaches these classes three or four times a month. One of those classes he asks me to help with, so we do sort of a team teaching approach once a month.
However, yesterday Mr. Yamada wasn’t available to teach the class with me, and apparently the other HR workers were too busy to take his place, so my boss asked me if it was possible to teach the class on my own. I was fine with it, and I put together a lesson plan that put more pressure on the students to speak out, and also avoided the use of any Japanese at all by anyone in the room. These kinds of classes can be a little more stressful for lower level students, but this was a special case and it worked out fine.
When I arrived at the classroom yesterday the staff in charge of training new employees were gathered in the “teacher’s room” (the lobby outside the classroom) as usual. Normally they give Mr. Yamada a lot of good-natured ribbing about this and that and they try to speak English with me. Their English skills are at the beginner level but they still try hard to speak with me. On this day, they knew that I would be working without a net so to speak, and they insisted on joining me in the classroom to help out.
We went in together, and the class went really well. I was more than a little moved by the staff stepping in to help me out. They are not great speakers of English, but they went in there knowing that the class would be 100% in English. They serve as role models for the students, not only in the classroom but also throughout the factory, and they were taking some risk by helping me out. If they make an English mistake or don’t understand some simple English instruction of mine, they could lose credibility with the students and students might lose motivation to study since even their instructors don’t know English well.
It was a nice thing they did to step up and help out. Since I hadn’t expected any help I designed the lesson so that I could do it all on my own, but my helpers were good at urging students to volunteer, to walk around and make sure they were doing their assignments, and to generally show that English is an important topic worth studying.
I thanked everyone for their help afterwards, and they laughed and said they were happy to do it. Perhaps it is the assistance from people who you least expect that makes the biggest impression. Anyway, it was a class that I won’t forget for a long time.
