Posts Tagged Teaching English
December 5, 2003 – First group kids class
Posted by Barniferous in Kawasaki Nova, Teaching English on December 5, 2013
(Original 2003 post)
Today was my first group kids class by myself. It is not easy to get 8 kids to pay attention to learning English for 40 minutes straight! I guess that is the difference between a good teacher and me.
(2013 update)
After only a few months as an English teacher, I was starting to feel mostly competent in the classroom, until I started teaching English to children. Unlike adult lessons where you don’t really know who will show up, the kids classes are scheduled at the same time every week with the same group. Adult lessons generally have students who are paying good money to learn English. The kids have no such personal investment in learning. I eventually became okay at teaching kids classes, but it was always my weakest point as a teacher.
November 19, 2003 – Easy day
Posted by Barniferous in Kawasaki Nova, Teaching English on November 19, 2013
Original 2003 Post:
What a great day! Three lessons, voice and an observation! Whee!
2013 Update:
An observation at NOVA was when an experienced teacher got to watch a training teacher’s lesson and offer feedback. Apparently my 6 weeks on the job qualified me to do this. Watching other teachers, even the training teachers, was a great way to get some new ideas for lessons. It also required no planning at all, which made things much more relaxed.
The biggest mistake that training teachers would make is on lesson timing. NOVA lessons were 40 minutes each and had a few different stages including a warm up, language introduction, drills, and then usually an activity to practice the new language. New teachers would rush through everything and be done in 20 minutes, leaving a 20 minutes of “WTF do I do now?”. During one memorable observation, the teacher actually opened the door and asked me for ideas on how to fill the remaining lesson time. I got him to get the students talking for a minute, and then frantically wrote down a list of ideas on a piece of paper.
If you are an English teacher and are getting to observe training teachers, make good comments and offer good advice. That way you will get picked for observations again and get a nice break from lesson planning and teaching!
November 17, 2003 – Kids Training
Posted by Barniferous in Karaoke, Teaching English on November 17, 2013
Original 2003 post:
Kids training in Totsuka (south of Yokohama). The provided map is a joke. We sing the alphabet song many times with the NOVA approved ending “sing sing sing sing sing with me” instead of the preferred “next time won`t you sing with me”. After training we hit the izakaya and are locked away in a private room with a karaoke machine. I successfully ruin music for everyone, and Mississippi Mike manages to sing Sugar Ray with a gangsta twist, followed by some freestyle Snoop Dogg. I sing Barbie Girl, and manage to barely catch the last train.
2013 Update:
NOVA Kids was a reliable money making machine for the company, and the bane of my existence in as an English teacher. Regular adult classes would have 1-4 students who generally were paying good money to learn English. The kids classes were groups of 1-8 kids that were only there because their parents forced them to go.
When I took my training there were 3 groups for kids classes: 3-6 year olds, 6-9 year olds, and 9-12 year olds. NOVA later added a class for kids under 3, which I firmly refused to be trained on.
All of the kids classes had a set curriculum, which made lesson planning relatively easy. Classroom management was the tough part. There is a large difference in maturity and abilities between a 3 year old and a 6 year old. 12 year old girls are not interested in singing the alphabet song, while 9 year old boys just want to push each other.
I did learn 2 valuable things in the kids training. The first was the Japanese words for pee and poop. When a young kid tells you that they need to go in the middle of the class, you get them to a bathroom. The second valuable thing was that what you say isn’t as important as how you say it. The instructor told us that the classroom was an English only environment. Teachers were not allowed to use Japanese at all. I asked how could we tell a kid to stop doing something if they don’t understand English. The instructor stood over me (while I was sitting on the floor), crossed his arms, put on an angry face and said “NO!” sharply and loudly. It is something that any kid (or adult) would understand, regardless of language.
Training was interesting, and even a little useful, but the best part of the day was still karaoke.
November 9, 2003 – Tongue Twisters
Posted by Barniferous in Kawasaki Nova, Teaching English on November 9, 2013
Original post
Language exchange in Yokohama today. I am meeting with an English grammar teacher who wants to improve her spoken English. I got to practice some Japanese, show off pics of Winnipeg, and exchanged tongue twisters. While she is practicing “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood” and “She sells seashells by the seashore”, I will be trying out “namamugi namagome namatamago” and “tonari no kyaku wa yoku kaki kuu kyaku da”. I got pretty good at saying “namatamago” but everything else was very challenging.
2013 Update
She sells seashells by the seashore was one of my favourite teaching tools. In Japanese there is a sound for “she” but not “sea”. Walking through this slowly was good pronunciation practice. For more advanced students, I would use this to practice emphasizing certain words in a sentence. For example, I would ask “What does she sell by the seashore” and the student would respond “She sells seashells by the seashore.” with the emphasis on seashells. It was a bit cruel, but also a lot of fun.
November 8, 2003 – Lazy teacher
Posted by Barniferous in Keikyu-Kawasaki NOVA, Teaching English on November 8, 2013
Original Post
Man I love Saturdays at Keikyu! I had a no show for my last lesson, so I sat in the teacher`s room and read a book and sent email with my phone.
2013 Update
As someone who takes a lot of pride in their work, reading my original post really made me cringe. NOVA was one of the few English schools that paid you even if students didn’t show up for lessons. If you were scheduled for 5 lessons, you got paid for 5 lessons even if nobody was there. In turn, the expectation is that when you have a free lesson that you find something productive to do in the office, and not just sit around reading and texting.
Kawasaki NOVA was always insanely busy, so nobody had ever needed to explain what I should do if I had an empty lesson. A few weeks after this original post, I was in the same situation and a senior teacher explained the priorities. The job list for free lessons included:
- Preparation of kids class materials – there was always some colouring, stapling or glueing that needed to be done for kids classes.
- Lesson preparation – ensuring that you were prepared for your upcoming lessons and reviewing or improving your current lessons
- Maintenance of student files – removing old students, replacing folders that were falling apart
- Tidying the office – teachers are generally very messy and there were always files, books and other things lying around the office
- Assisting the staff
From that time forward, whenever I saw a new teacher sitting around doing nothing I was able to get them working.
October 18, 2003 – The blind leading the blind
Posted by Barniferous in Kawasaki Nova, Teaching English on October 18, 2013
(complete rewrite from the original post)
Work was insane today. Overall there were 4 schedule changes. Since I am still pretty new, it takes me a long time to plan my lessons. A schedule change may involve a new student added into a lesson. That new student might have recently done the lesson you were planning to teach, which will involve finding a new lesson that works for everyone. It is also possible to have your entire lesson switched with another teacher to avoid the same student having two lessons in a row with the same teacher. Again, this will involve coming up with something new on short notice.
Due to continuous changes, I ended up with a business class student for a short time. The business class involved a set curriculum which I knew nothing about. Fortunately one of the senior teachers saw the problem and got this fixed before I failed spectacularly. My other big challenge was being scheduled with a low level student who was nearly completely blind. Nova was supposed to be heavily focused on speaking and listening, but there was still a big textbook component to the lessons. Some of the more experienced teachers had been given special instruction on how to work with blind students, but I am still a novice teacher about 3 weeks into the job. I ended up getting switched to the Voice room 5 minutes before the class started.
Kawasaki Nova is too busy!
Dom’s first day of work
Posted by Barniferous in Karaoke, Life in Japan, Shenanigans on February 16, 2011
With the Blog reboot this story won’t be happening for a while. So this is now a quick preview of upcoming content:
This happened in mid 2005 when I was teaching English in Mishima, Japan. On this particular day, a new teacher was starting. Let’s call him “Dom” from England. Dom didn’t know it at the time, but he was in for quite the first day of work.
We were in the office awaiting him to show up for his first shift. When he didn’t show up right away, I started to get a little concerned because you generally need a lot more time in your first week to get ready for lessons. Mhairi told me not to worry, she had given him good directions on how to get on the train, which way to go, and to leave the North exit of Mishima station. Unforunately for her, the school was on the South side of the train station. I took off towards the station, passed through to the North side and started looking for a lost foreigner. At the same time I was heading North, Dom had figured out his mistake and went South, passing me, and went to the school. I got a call and managed to get back in time for my lesson, sweating and out of breath.
Dom and I had the same dinner break, so I took him to the awesome noodle shop across the street from work. Having been in the country for about a year and a half at the time, I was quite good at using chopsticks to eat a bowl of steaming hot noodles and forgot that there were some people who might find this challenging. Dom somehow managed to eat about half of his soup, sharing generously with his tie.
When the other teachers showed up for the evening lessons I found out that there was going to be a big student party in the evening. Thinking that this would be a good opportunity to celebrate a new teacher arriving, I told Dom the details, leaving out the part that there would be a lot of students in attendance. Hanging out with students outside of the classroom was not allowed and could lead to anything from a reprimand to termination. After work we took the train to Fuji station and I filled him in on the way to the karaoke place.
Karaoke was a total gong show. For those who don’t know, karaoke in Japan is usually all you can drink. There were about 20 people in the room and we were all making good use of the drink ordering phone.
One of the fun things to do when you are young and drunk in Japan is room hopping. The idea is that you grab a beer and start visiting the other rooms. The best way is to just open the door, yell “KANPAI” and then see if anyone will clink your beer. Sometimes you get a good response, sometimes you get politely shooed out the door. Mhairi, Dom and I made the rounds. We always sent Mhairi in first because very few people will turn away a hot blond Scottish girl. The last room we came to was the exception to the rule. The women ignored Mhairi and literally dragged Dom and I into the room. The (less than impressed) Japanese guys went out into the hall to talk to Mhairi. One of the ladies started talking to me in rapid fire drunken Japanese, of which I understood about 40% of. She slowed down and asked me how old I thought she was. This is a fantastically dangerous question at the best of times. I figured mid to late 30s, so I said 28. This was apparently the correct answer. She leaned in and whispered in my ear that her son was 18 and her daughter was 15. I tried to recover from my shock by telling her that I didn’t have any kids. She asked if I was married, I said no, and then she jammed the microphone in my hand and made me sing. While I was singing she wrote down her phone number and jammed it in my shirt pocket.
I looked over to see how Dom was dealing with all of this, only to notice that his woman had very busy hands and decided to put her phone number in his front pants pocket. After forcing him to sing Abba we eventually found a way to escape the room and rejoin the other group.
The rest of the night was mostly incident free. I don’t know how Dom could have had a more eventful first day of work. For me, it was one of the last times I ever went room hopping. And for the record, no, I did not call the lady.
Drinking in Japan 
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