News Events - Pet Cockroaches

Smith’s School of English, Kyobashi has a fair number of students that are very interested in the news and either read the newspaper, watch the news on TV, or keep up-to-date on everything in English on the Internet. It’s quite handy to keep a mental note of those students when I’m skimming through their files, trying to choose their next lesson. A lot of these students really like to tackle the articles from the News Event section of the curriculum. One of the articles that has been known to produce a pretty emotional response in students is the one that revolves around pet cockroaches.

My last student the other night is usually so talkative and eager to openly express his opinions on just about anything or fish around for some of mine that I thought the pet cockroaches article would be perfect for sparking up some great conversation. Once we’d gotten through some casual banter and reviewed the one point from the previous lesson, I handed him his copy of the article. Wow! That was his initial reaction at seeing the article title as well as the photo of the massive cockroach in full color. I jokingly asked him if he’d already eaten dinner and if it was okay to proceed with the slightly squeamish topic. He reassured me that although he isn’t a big fan of cockroaches he was really intrigued to figure out why anyone would want to keep one as a pet.

First of all, I had him read the article aloud since it works well to improve the student’s confidence at speaking in English without worrying too much about making mistakes. We paused here and there to correct some pronunciation errors and smooth out his intonations. He repeated some of the words three or four times to himself to drill it in before moving on. After he’d gone through the article the first time, we went through it a second time to take a look at some of the new vocabulary. Next came the comprehension check which took the form of questions relating to the article. I asked him the accompanying questions for the article and he answered most of them with only the occasional glance at the article to see if he remembered accurately. So far, so good! We then began to discuss cockroaches in general and what he thought of them. He went out of his way to keep his room clean to keep the cockroaches out and shared my fear of the flying menaces during the summer. Apparently, cockroaches would never become a pet choice for him regardless of how little space he had in his apartment. We shared a few cockroach tales where we’d perhaps overreacted to their presence and kind of did some anti-insect bonding over them.

At this point, we didn’t have much time left because he’d had too much fun with the item so we reviewed a handful of questions from Routine 1 and then moved onto the new one point. Having successfully done that, off he went to eat dinner and put those pesky roaches out of his mind.