Today I woke up with a slight hangover and I remembered that I have a special lesson this morning at a junior high school to try to get students to come to our school next year.
I got over the hangover quick enough, went into school, and before long I was speeding down the road with Mori sensei. She was running a little late, so we got there with just enough time to have a short chat with the receptionist, and before we knew it, we were standing in front of a class of students.
The students gave us a premeditated round of applause, and they even had made their own name cards, so it was very easy to call on the students.
I had never taught with Mori sensei before – she had always struck me as the type to over-prepare and then get caught up in the details. I think today that happened, and so the lesson (at least to me) didn’t go that smoothly. That’s not to say that it wasn’t a success, but it didn’t live up to what it could have been.
Mori sensei had lots of teaching materials – probably too many, and so she spent lots of time leafing through them looking for the right one. She spent a lot of time trying to convince the students to come to our school by showing off the things that they don’t have at their junior high school (like a cafeteria, a table tennis room, etc). The students didn’t react to these things at all, really. They just waited for the next English question to come. That wasn’t the only problem, though.
This is going to sound egotistical, but the class didn’t focus on me. What I mean is, any Japanese teacher can go in there and teach the students, but it’s a rare opportunity for them to interact with a native speaker of English. Although the lesson plan called for me speaking with the students in several parts of the lesson, we tended to skip over those. Instead, Mori sensei used her English to instruct the students on what to do. Unfortunately, sometimes even I couldn’t understand what she was trying to say to them.
Another example was pronunciation – she would introduce a new word, and then I would say it, and the students would repeat after me. After a couple of times, Mori sensei decided to cut the middle man (me) out, and so she had the students repeating after her. That’s probably a bad idea, because her accent isn’t very natural sounding.
You might think that I thought the class went horribly from what I’ve said so far, but there were some good points. The students reacted well to the questions that I posed to them, and I was impressed with their confidence. They were generally pretty quiet, but occasionally they would laugh at something or talk about an answer among themselves. They weren’t as relaxed as my classes are, but my classes have students that know me and each other quite well by now.
After class as we walked back to the principal’s office for the traditional chat over coffee I got a chance to say hello to a lot of students in the hallways, and that was fun. They reacted really well, and their greetings in English sounded very natural.
The principal had us in his clutches for almost an hour talking about all kinds of things, from ESL teaching in America, to the jungles of Africa – he seemed like a lonely guy. He said that he’d like us to come again soon, and seemed very positive about the class.
On the drive back I gave Mori sensei my honest opinions about the lesson, and she took them to heart. She was excited about the chance to go back and teach another lesson, and I mentioned that of course he would be willing to have us back – we are teaching his students for free. His teachers are getting some time off, and our school is paying the bill. She thought that it was funny – I guess she hadn’t thought about it in that way before.
I did a little paperwork when I got back to school, and then took off around noon. I took the local train home from Takasago, and when I got off a pretty blond foreigner that I ran into a while back came walking down the steps of the station with me. I said hello in English, and she answered in Japanese, and so we talked in Japanese. She is from Russia, and is working for about 8 months in Japan in Kobe. I guess she lives around here somewhere.
We talked about life in Japan and she was really interested to hear about America and California. When we got to the bike rack where her bike was she rustled through her bag and came up with a menu of a restaurant where she works. It’s a “European” food restaurant, kind of a mix of many different styles. She invited me to come there sometime, and said she wants to chat with me more. She seemed nice enough, but it’s weird to speak Japanese with another foreigner – and it’s weird to see a foreigner in Japan who is not teaching English in some way.
Now I’m back at home and getting ready to go into Kobe and meet up with Kuniko to try on some wedding garb. I’ll write more later!
