For the past week I’ve been commuting into southern Osaka to teach an intensive English course for new employees at Daikin. I taught at the same event last year, and it was one of the best times I’ve ever had teaching. This year I couldn’t teach both of the two week sessions because of some class conflicts, so this year I was teaching only this week.<\/p>\n
Last year’s students were at the low-intermediate level, but this year I was picked to teach the lowest level class. This was a tough class to teach. Even a class one level higher has some measure of English ability, but there is no bottom limit at the level I was teaching. That meant slow progress and a bit more frustration for the students. <\/p>\n
The materials that we used were the same as last year, but because they are targeted squarely at the middle, my students really had to stretch to not only understand but to use the expressions. I had to throw out a lot of the standard activities and substitute them for simpler ones, and in the end things went well. <\/p>\n
Most of my students this year were kind of nerdy guys who spent the evenings playing pachinko, smoking and drinking and really didn’t see the need to study English. In contrast to last year, it was a little harder to bond with the students and get comfortable. <\/p>\n
Hopefully they feel better about English now, and I think I got through to a couple of students who said they want to study English in the future. Still, I didn’t have the same feeling of satisfaction as after last year’s courses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the past week I’ve been commuting into southern Osaka to teach an intensive English course for new employees at Daikin. I taught at the same event last year, and it was one of the best times I’ve ever had teaching. This year I couldn’t teach both of the two week sessions because of some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-pq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}