How did it go in Tokyo?

When I walked in the school yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to find M, one of the students at former Horie school sitting on the couch waiting nervously for his first lesson here at Smith's School of Kyobashi. The relieved look on his face when I cheerfully greeted him was just priceless. He asked me if I would be teaching him and I assured him of that knowing the girls would have considered his situation and scheduled me as his teacher for the day.

Since I knew that M had been the only student in most of his classes at Horie, and that he had done almost everything in the curriculum at his level, I told him that the chance of having 1 or 2 classmates would be very high here at Kyobashi, and we would also have to do some review of the curriculum from basic level. He was very understanding and had no problem with my suggestion. Once that was out of the way, I decided to move to the lesson I prepared for him, simple past tense.

I first introduced the two basic categories of verbs in past tense by writing down two groups of verbs and then eliciting their past forms from M. He went through them pretty quickly with only a couple of minor mistakes. I then showed him the picture cards and asked him to make one sentence using a past time out of each card, e.g. "I ate sushi for dinner last night".

After we were done with this practice, I decided to ask him about his week in Tokyo as he told me earlier that he had an exhibition of his stained-glass works there. He was very happy and eager to share his experience with me, but in the process made quite a few mistakes with the tense and verbs. I corrected him only once in a while as I didn't want to discourage him, but I jotted down a few things that I thought were important and pointed them out to him afterwards, which he accepted appreciatively.

Just before the class ended, M mentioned that he had been a bit worried about changing to a new environment, but now he believed that he had made the right decision coming to Kyobashi.