Live from Japan!

So this week I have had my first introduction to teaching in japan. Holy crap! this teaching stuff is hard! I have to admit the first time I gave my first lesson, it was a bit of a bomb. It took my a couple of trys but today I gave my 4th lesson and I think I may be starting to get the hang of it.

My lesson was introducing myself. You might think that this would be easy, after all you are an expert on yourself aren’t you? Well just knowing what you are talking about was the easy part. Timing was the hardest part. How much time does it take to answer a hand full of questions? How much time does it take to talk about this aspect of myself? How long can they listen to me drone on before their heads turn into jelly?

All of these are super difficult questions. I still have no idea how one is supposed to figure all this out before he give the lesson a try…

Also, I come from an academic background, my parents were both scientists and I worked in an academic country. Suddenly I have to talk about myself using words fit for a group of students with a vocabulary of around a thousand or so words (and lets face it most of them probably haven’t even mastered those). This is more of a challenge then I would have thought. Especially because the japanese students dont really let you know if they have no clue what you are saying.

All and all however, i think most of the lessons I gave this week have been sucessful. The first one failed and, (I am quite proud of myself for this), I mannaged to look at what went wrong objectivly and fix the lesson for the next day. The next class was better and the two following that went very smoothly.

Above is a picture of some of the materials I generated for the class. They have become pretty good I think (I had to revise after my first lesson). The last activity the students have at the end of the lesson is to come up with questions that they would like to ask me. I will try to answer them all in class. So far I have been pretty impressed. The questions are pretty good, simple and with some common, (i guess) grammar mistakes, but fun and easy to answer. I will let you know if I find any that are particularly funny, or cute. My current personal favorite is “Do you think your wife cute? Please show us your love for your wife!”