Live from Japan!

At school this week we have started our first textbook lesson. This lesson is all about small talk, so I have been teaching my students the magic of small talk. This is a perfect skill for them to learn because it what we do most frequently in English – we talk about the weather, or what we are going to do on the weekend. It is rare when we delve into more difficult conversation, especially at school or during class.

One way that we have practiced doing small talk is by playing a game of Bingo. The students each have a bingo sheet with 25 different small talk type questions.

Most of the questions are pretty easy for my students. I guess that is the point. I am trying to drill them on the easy stuff here at the beginning, helping to make English easy and automatic (we will get to trickier stuff later). I am trying to help them build confidence in their abilities and not to worry too much about what they don’t know (which is, obviously, a lot).

Once they finish writing their short answers down on their bingo sheet we start to play. I pull one question out of the big hat and ask one student. When they give me their answer, any student with the same answer puts an “x” in the box. The first student to get bingo wins.

Yesterday when I was playing this game with a group of first year students, I called on a boy in my class and asked him one of the trickier questions, “Who do you admire?”

As soon as I asked it, he turned beet red! He said his answer very softly, so softly that neither myself, nor my JTE, could understand what he said. I am working very hard with the students to make them more comfortable speaking in front of their peers, so I went to his side and gave him a little encouragement. Then I asked the question again.

This time, he said his answer a little louder:

I still couldn’t quite make out what he was saying so I took a little peek at his paper. Imagine my surprise when I looked down and saw my name (in katakana, of course) written in the box. I think I turned just about as red as he had. I said the answer a little louder, for him, and thanked him.

But then I was even more surprised when a few shouts and yells erupted from the classroom. Apparently he wasn’t the only one that had my name on his sheet and other students were quite excited to be able to mark their square.

(By the way, that second paper, the one with the heart around my name. That paper belongs to a boy.)

It was one of the biggest, warmest, fuzziest moments that I have had in my classroom this year, and I was so shocked and flattered that my students thought to write my name in that box. I guess I have made a pretty good impression so far.

I don’t want to misrepresent the situation, there were a number of other, more teenage typical, answers in the box as well:

Ichiro is a very famous Japanese baseball player that now plays in the American League, for the Seattle Mariners.

Steven Spielberg, of course.

All in all, it was a really good lesson. The students seem to have had fun and I walked out of the room feeling as though I had accomplished most of my goals. Not bad for a days work!