Hot Spa..

When I didn't see my 8pm student in the lobby this evening, I was a bit worried because I remembered him mentioning his wife having some medical condition last time in class. Anyway, it was a great relief when he walked into Smith's School of English Kyobashi 10 minutes later.

Naturally, I asked him about his wife and he was surprised that I remembered our conversation but also happy to tell me that everything was fine and in fact he and his wife took a 2 day trip just last weekend to one of the most famous onsen (hot spa) places in Japan -- Kinosaki! Having been to Kinosaki once in summer myself, I was more than happy to compare notes with him. We had a great conversation about Kinosaki and hot spas in general, I was even invited to Oita since my student was originally from there and his family still lived there! During the conversation, I used the questions from Japan Sea routine without actually informing him of what I was doing, but he did extremely well and got plenty of practice out of it without knowing. Nice conversation AND abundant practice, double bonus!

We then proceeded to the item part of the lesson, which was about passive voice. I pretty much just followed the lesson plan till practice 1. When we went through the passive voice quiz activity, we had a good laugh about each other's lack of Japanese history and sports knowledge, but hey, we were here for an English class! We had so much fun that I didn't even realize that the minute hand was pointing at 45! I had to bring my class to an end by introducing a one-point:" If you go to...., I recommend you to...." As I expected, he had no problem giving me an example once I told him what "recommend" meant. I assured him that I would listen to him and try out the foot spa next time I went to Kinosaki!

Spirit of the season.

Here at Smith's School of English we have students of all levels. They range from true beginners to confident vets looking to maintain their exposure to English. Today's lesson was with a set of particularly high level students. This means to me that the lesson could really go in a lot of unplanned directions. I always prepare a lesson regardless of student level but I'm always ready to abandon that lesson plan in the even that the students pull me in a different direction of interest.

With that in mind I started out by reviewing the one points from their previous lessons. This went smoothly and the students all came up with their own original phrases with only a bit of support from me. After this I moved into a review of some key questions from the Smith's routines. I facilitated this by asking them to discuss each others weekends and ask expansive questions of each other. Once they successfully demonstrated use of all the questions I had expected of them we moved into a discussion topic as an Item.

Not unexpectedly, something interesting came up in the course of discussing their weekends. One student remarked that she sees many Japanese customers buying Christmas presents at her shop and this struck her as odd since most Japanese people aren't practicing Christians. What an interesting topic! We went on to discuss what Christmas means to each student and what it means to them. We also discussed how they perceive Christmas not only in Japan but in western countries. They had lots of practice using English and had some pretty interesting stories to tell! Before I knew it we had finished the lesson and it was time for a new one point so we finished with that.