The Sixth Sense

One of the best books I use for teaching private lessons is called "Impact Issues". Each lesson contains a story meant to open up discussion on a particular topic and a page of opinions that students can agree or disagree with. The topics cover a broad range of issues, but one of the most interesting lessons is called "Flight 77". In this particular lesson, a man talks about how he was about to board an airplane and decides not to after a voice tells him that he should not get on the plane. The teacher and student then discuss the potential origin of the voice.

This topic is good because it opens up the floor for spiritual discussions, but tends to avoid the overall topic of religion. While Japanese people aren't especially religious (on the whole) and it's unlikely that an uncomfortable discussion would develop on the topic, they also don't have much knowledge about religion and tend not to be overly interested in it. Spirituality, on the other hand, is something they do have their own notions about and can discuss with varying levels of enthusiasm.

As part of the discussion of this lesson, it's usual to ask the student if he or she has ever had any sort of metaphysical experience. While most of the students I've spoken with believe that the "voice" in the story in the "Flight 77" lesson is not a product of the author's imagination (and was a genuine spiritual warning), only one of them has said she has had a similar experience. This particular student told me a story from her childhood which was remarkably similar to the one in the textbook.

When she was a child of about 7, my student was playing a game where she and some friends pretended to be "invisible". As part of this game, one person kept her eyes open and the others kept their eyes closed. In this instance, my student and another friend were walking around with eyes closed while one other friend directed them. The friend who could see would tell the other two what to do as they walked "blindly". The "seeing" friend was preoccupied with the other person as the three of them approached a street. My student was just walking along with her eyes closed when she heard a voice (in her mind) clearly tell her to stop walking. She stopped and opened her eyes to find she would have walked in front of a car if she had continued on.

Oddly enough, my husband had a relatively similar experience when he was 15 years old. He was standing at a light waiting for it to turn green so he could cross a street. No cars were coming and the light turned green. Just as he was lowering his foot to the curb, he had a very strong feeling that he should not step into the street. He didn't hear anything and couldn't work out why he should feel that way so he looked up the street and soon saw a car speeding down the street which ran the light. If he had completed that step, the car would have hit him and possibly killed him given that it was going about 50 mph in a 35 mph zone. In my husband's case, he didn't hear a voice but received a strong "message" from his body nonetheless. He was being told to freeze and not step out.

When I asked my student why she thought she received such a message and many other people die in accidents, she said that she felt that it wasn't her time. She felt that she was meant to hang around on the planet and learn and experience life for awhile longer so she was stopped from prematurely making her exit. I feel that the same was the case with my husband. I think he and I were meant to journey through at least part of our lives together and it was very important for both of us that it be this way.

I know many people don't believe in this sort of thing and will concoct some sort of "logical" explanation (e.g., they both heard the cars and reacted to the sound on an unconscious level) and that's okay. If someone is so frightened of the idea that the world and our experiences may not be defined entirely by sensory stimuli and neurological processing of that stimuli, they can make up any explanation they want to sooth themselves. However, making up experiences that didn't happen in order to more comfortably explain what actually did happen is just as fanciful as speculating on the metaphysical. It's just a matter of being open-minded about the possibility of "sixth senses" or not.

Con Men

Yesterday afternoon, a student told me a story about her work at a popular casual clothing retailer. She said that there is a man who is well known at all her employer's branches for trying to pull a trick on them to cheat them out of money. The man buys an item of clothing, takes it home, damages it slightly (e.g., a small tear), and then returns to the shop he bought it from to lodge a complaint. When he complains, he insists on getting his money back and keeping the damaged garment.

My student said that this man keeps using different names when he pulls this stunt at various stores, but his face is well-known by now. While this trick initially worked due to the Japanese desire to please the customer and their squeamishness with being confronted in anger, it is no longer effective since it has become clear that he is a petty con man.

I used my student's working experience as an opportunity to teach her the term "con man" and she asked me why such scammers were named so. I explained the origin of the term to her, but afterwards I got to thinking about how teaching English requires you to have some understanding of the origin of words and terms in your own language that not all people possess. I wondered how many people understand the origin of "con man" who are not British. (I'm pretty sure that most British folks know it because I've heard it used in its full form (confidence trickster/man) in British television shows.

The sad thing is that a lot of teachers who don't know the answer to a question regarding grammar or the origin of a word will simply say, 'that's just the way it is,' rather than admit they're not sure why it is that way. Generally speaking, that's probably not such a big deal, but being able to explain things properly does help the student learn more effectively and remember the meaning of the words better. If I tell a student the "con" in "con man" comes from "confidence" because the scammer has to gain the confidence of his mark, she's far more likely to recall the meaning when she hears the words on a T.V. show or in a movie than if I just tell her, "that's just the way it is."

Chemical Communication

Millions of kids everyday echo a sentiment which I can't recall ever having uttered during my 16 years in the American educational system. In regards to science, history and math classes in particular, you hear kids talk about how they can't understand why they're studying something that they will almost certainly never use. It's the constant struggle of teachers to convince their pupils that learning is about broadening their minds and expanding their ability to think analytically. To some extent, I bought into this idea and I always believed that it was more interesting to know more than what I immediately perceived with my limited senses. I was probably just too unpopular to occupy my thoughts otherwise but studying all the stuff which didn't directly apply to daily life was interesting to me and made me feel like life was more than my boring and often miserable rural existence.

One of the classes which I didn't like though was chemistry. It wasn't that I lacked an interest in chemistry itself but rather that I hated the teacher because he was none too fond of me. This became crystal clear when I was sick for about a week and returned to find a test on that very day of my return which I couldn't possibly have prepared for (because I hadn't been there when it was announced). As this jerk of a teacher passed out the tests, I told him I couldn't take it because I hadn't had time to prepare. He told me I had to anyway but I refused because it simply wasn't fair to spring a test on me like that. Rather than allow me to take the test later, he simply failed me.

Given the injustice of what had happened, and the fact that I was a straight "A" student up to that point, I told my mother and she complained bitterly to the principal. I never did take the test but the teacher gave me a "C" and my grade averaged out to a "B" for the semester. It was still unfair, but I guess he got to play his power game with a student he didn't like and come out with a draw rather than a loss. I didn't get the grade I would have gotten if I'd have had a chance to take the test under fair conditions but he also wasn't allowed to unfairly fail me.

To this day, I'm not sure why he disliked me so much. I wasn't some disruptive little snot nor an insufferable know-it-all. The only thing that ever occurred to me was that he was absolutely enthralled with my best friend at the time and I wonder if he had some warped sort of jealousy going on because she hung out with me so much. To this day, I think he had some sort of pervy lust for her. He certainly seemed to put her on a pedestal in classes all the time and pay a lot of undue attention to every experiment she did. I guess some lecherous old deviants had to have been the inspiration for Lolita.

At any rate, despite all the unpleasantness I endured from that mean-spirited bastard, I did study hard and enjoy the concepts behind chemistry. I'm guessing I'd have gotten a lot more out of it if my teacher had been less petty and neurotic, but one thing I did get out of it was a decent memory of the periodic table of the elements from having had to memorize it. While I can't say that I remember it all now, I do remember the more common elements. Strangely enough, this has actually come in handy from time to time during my English teaching in Japan.

While I've never been in a chemistry lesson in a Japanese school, my experiences lead me to believe they also have to study the periodic table with the same abbreviations in roman letters rather than with Japanese characters. On several occasions, including one this past evening, I've been able to explain an element to a student using its abbreviation on the periodic table. In the past, sodium and iron have come in handy and this evening I dug way back in my memory to remember that lead is Pb so I could help a student understand that "lead" was Pb and not the verb "lead" (as in acting as a leader).

While I realize that not many people are going to grow up and become English teachers in foreign countries where they may find the ability to convey ideas through universally-understood abbreviations helpful, my situation does show that you never know when something that seems esoteric at the time you learn it may actually prove useful. I've certainly found that all the sentence diagramming that was done in my English classes has been paying off.

Disservice

For the past month and a half, I've conducted five private lessons with a non-Japanese Asian woman. This wasn't my first experience teaching a non-Japanese person, though I can say that such experiences are not all that common. Because of their relative rarity, they stand out in stark contrast to what it is like to teach Japanese people and often make me consider how teaching English well to one group of people doesn't necessarily prepare you to do so for other people.

From my past experiences with teaching Chinese folks, I knew that at least two things were going to differ compared to my usual lessons. First of all, she was almost certainly going to be more assertive in lessons and require fewer leading questioning to elicit her opinions. While not all Japanese people express themselves reluctantly or are passive, Tokyoites are renowned for their reserve and, by and large, this is reflected in their lessons. Second, her pronunciation was likely going to be harder for me to understand since the types of mistakes made by Chinese speakers of English are not like those made by Japanese speakers.

When I have a non-Japanese student, it brings home rather strikingly how experience makes you a better teacher mainly for the type of people you typically encounter, but not so much for everyone in general. The fact is that you come to understand what your students are saying better as you become more familiar with the types of problems they typically have. There are words that you would never have recognized or understood if you had encountered a random Japanese tourist back home which you have no problems whatsoever understanding after spending some time teaching.

While this recognition is a blessing in terms of understanding what your students mean to say, it can end up being a curse in the long run. If that recognition means you stop correcting or noticing the mistakes because you've grown so accustomed to them that they no longer hinder your comprehension, you can end up not helping your student improve in ways that will assist them in the real world of English communication.

Another problem that comes along with experience is understanding and giving into the impulse to speak Japanese when you're an English teacher. Teachers who are even roughly proficient in Japanese often end up translating for their students rather than conducting a lesson only in English. Typically, a student will mumble the word in Japanese that he can't come up with in English and the teacher who recognizes the word will confidently and quickly offer up the English. What is worse though are the teachers who fail to explain things in English at all in a simple and slow fashion and ramble on in Japanese. The problem with this sort of teaching is that it doesn't force the student to think in English or learn to work with the vocabulary he has. It's very important for people to learn to be able to say what they have to say indirectly when they can't do so directly as it will serve them well in travel and business situations which require English. For instance, if the student can't say "thief", he can at least say the equivalent, "a bad person who takes things things from other people to get money."

Instant translations decrease the likelihood that the student will remember the English as he made no effort to find the meaning of a word and will grow accustomed to not having to study on his own with a handy living gaijin dictionary in front of him. That's not to say there isn't a time and a place for teaching English basics in Japanese but rather that that time is almost never when a native speaker is doing the job. It's a case for Japanese teachers who have training, qualifications and skill in teaching low level students with no or very rudimentary skills.

In both the case of the teacher who knows Japanese-English well and fails to correct mistakes and the teacher who uses Japanese, the student is being done a disservice if the study is about actually improving the students' skills (rather than about a paid, structured social interaction with a foreigner). Those teachers who use Japanese generally do so to make their lives easier rather than to help the student and there's really no excuse for it because it's easy to avoid using Japanese a lesson. With omnipresent electronic dictionaries, teachers absolutely do not need to translate for students. Even the act of punching in a word and reading what is on the screen for themselves will provide a small increase in the chance that a student will remember the translation compared to a teacher blurting out the word.

The other case involving a lack of correction due to so much familiarity with Japanese pronunciation and English errors is one which I find myself having to be vigilant about because it's not as cut and dry as choosing not to speak Japanese. I don't correct every one of those types of mistakes because sometimes it'd bog the lesson down completely but I do try to focus on certain sounds which are problems and correct them assiduously for a particular student until there is some improvement before moving on to the next one. Still, I'm not certain that I'm not doing as well with this as I might if I weren't so experienced.

It's a bit ironic that experience and cultural understanding may actually contribute to one being less effective in some ways when one is a teacher. Certainly there are ways in which having experience really helps. You learn the roots of typical grammar problems because of translation errors and the incomprehensible can be recognized and corrected more efficiently. Additionally, students have greater confidence when they can make themselves understood well and a lack of confidence is one of the bigger issues with Japanese people speaking English. Pacing lessons also becomes second nature as is how quickly or slowly to speak based on a student's level. All that being said, those that are truly interested in helping their students have to keep their impulses to make things easy in check.

Illusion

One of my students just returned from a trip to England where she was lucky enough to experience the charm and beauty of some of the small villages within reach of London via public transportation. She brought back pictures that made me ache for home because the expansive and richly green farms, fields, and trees reminded me of Pennsylvania. She also brought me back a box of Cornish Fairings which are incredibly good. I must say that I've rarely had a bad or mundane pre-packaged cookie made in England and the vast majority of "biscuits" I've had from there seem to be perfect blends of flavor, sweetness, and just the right texture. If bad cookies are being made there, they aren't finding their way to Japanese shops or into the hands of souvenir-distributing students.

Getting back to the topic at hand though, which is my student's trip, she told me that she went with a friend and her sister. I asked her if either of them spoke English as well as her and she said that her friend hardly speaks it at all but her sister's ability is superior to hers. My student is no slouch in terms of her English abilities so I asked her why she had this impression of her sister. She said that, when they engaged in casual conversations with strangers in England, her sister always responded readily and fully while she felt rather uncertain about whether or not she fully understood the question.

My student said that she couldn't figure out how her sister managed to develop such talents because she hasn't studied for quite some time and her only English study experience was while studying for university entrance exams. While it's possible that her sister has a knack for languages and just took to English like a house on fire, it's also possible that her sister is simply offering an illusion of fluency that my student is unable to detect.

In part because I didn't want my student to feel inferior to her sister (or anyone else), I decided to tell her about a well-known fact among English teachers who work in Japan. The truth is that it is possible for a student to jabber on in a fashion which makes them appear quite conversant in a language to those who don't natively speak it when they really aren't understanding the question properly at all or giving an appropriate answer. Such people usually guess at the nature of a question based on various key words and then charge ahead with a long-winded reply which completely missed the gist of the question. I can't tell you how many times I've said "tell me about your company's business" and gotten the answer "I work in (accounting/sales/research)." The student hears "your" and "business" and ignores the rest.

This particular problem is probably more common among Japanese people because they often experience teachers who aren't fluent (Japanese teachers of English in their pre-college years) or who are native speakers of English who are more interested in entertainment than in improving their students' skills. A lot of teachers never insist that a student answer a question correctly or explain the nature of their misunderstanding. They just smile and pretend the answer was right and carry on. This is essentially the same thing that a stranger you'd meet on a train in London would do if a question he's asked is answered in an energetic but incorrect fashion. Natives who strike up conversations with tourists are unlikely in the extreme to do something that will embarrass the person to whom they're speaking.

While I have no way of knowing for sure, I'm pretty sure that my student's sister was giving the illusion of fluency she does not truly possess and my student, who can't judge the English skills of others just as she cannot correct her own mistakes, couldn't tell the difference.

•••••••••••••••••••••

Incidentally, and tangentially-related to this story, my student told me that a nice young British fellow on a sleeper train they were on who struck up a conversation with these three obviously Asian young women broke the ice with "are you French?" She said that one of her friends was carrying a shopping bag from a famous French bakery but she was still baffled that he'd conclude from the bag that they might be French. It's my guess that he knew they were not but didn't want to guess at their nationality for fear of offending them should he guess wrong. While some Japanese people think they can distinguish between Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, etc., just by looking at their faces most of us westerners can't make such distinctions.

The Heat

Today has been the hottest day of the year so far in Tokyo and I had a chat about the weather with "little old man" (LOM) before he launched into a long talk about how he spent a sweaty but "exciting" time on the golf driving range. LOM loves his golf. He once spent three lessons getting through telling me about one game in minute detail.

Getting back to the weather though, LOM told me that one of the effects of all this heat is that he doesn't sleep very well. He said he has an air conditioner but he doesn't like to use it all night so he puts it on a 30-minute timer just before bed and when the heat inevitably wakes him up again and again, he runs it each time on a 30-minute timer because he thinks running it all night is going to cause him to freeze to death or get very sick.

After telling me about this drawback of the heat, he wanted to tell me about some other ill effect so he pulled out his electronic dictionary and started poking at the keys. He slowly said that the heat makes him "im-po-tience". I was pretty sure he didn't mean what it sounded like so I just smiled and said, "impo... what?" He repeated "impotience" and I asked to see his dictionary at which point I realized he meant, "impatient".

Sometimes I wonder what the students would think if they could read my mind when such little errors occur. Generally speaking, I'm rather glad they can't.

Gurnard

When you're a language teacher, you spend a lot of your time introducing new words to your students. On rare occasions, you find that your students will introduce new words to you. I'm not talking about learning Japanese words but about English words that I've never heard of before.

One of the reasons you tend to hear "new" English words is that most students are working out of dictionaries that haven't been updated since the turn of the previous century. They poke at their electronic dictionaries to find the English for a Japanese word they can't express (or refuse to express) in simple English and out pops some antiquated or obscure word that even your Grandpa wouldn't use.

Another reason is that the dictionaries give awkward translations in lieu of multi-word accurate translations. Most bi-lingual dictionaries seem to have been written by the same type of people who teach high school English in Japan. That is, the type who aren't actually fluent in the language that is their livelihood and never double-check their understanding but mainly draw their information from research sources who had little better knowledge of the language than they do. A good example of this is that the Japanese word "tokucho" is sometimes found to mean "characteristic" in dictionaries but a better translation would be "distinguishing feature". You find that students often mis-use "characteristic" because they are substituting it for situations where they'd use tokucho.

One of the obscure English words that I learned early on was "antifebrile". I also learned it's brother, "antipyretic". Unless you're a doctor or involved in medicine in some fashion, these aren't the sorts of words one tends to encounter. However, the Japanese seems absolutely obsessed with taking their temperatures and the doctors equally obsessed with doling out medication for even a hint of fever so it's not uncommon for a student who has made his or her semi-weekly trip to the doctor in a panic over a "fever" to mention that he or she was given antifebrile medication. (Yes, I exaggerate, but just a little. ;-) )

This evening, I learned another new English word from one of my students, gurnard. My student was telling me about her weekend activities and how they were affected by the typhoon. On Saturday, a barbecue had been planned by one of her friends. He was going to grill steaks, shrimp, and various tubers on a grill set up by the sea or a river but the rain put the kibosh on his plans for a scenic locale. The barbecue, which was also a 32nd birthday party for one of the attendees, was held despite the heavy rain. Everyone crowded under the cover of his car's parking space and spent 10 hours eating, talking, and, mostly, drinking. I guess that standing in a parking space for the better part of the day is bound to inspire copious amounts of imbibing.

While my student's Saturday was plagued by the typhoon, her Sunday was enhanced by it. One of her friends works at an expensive hotel in Yokohama and the hotel had planned a weekend of festivities for its guests including fireworks. The expectation was that a large number of guests would appear there and patronize the restaurants because the fireworks could be seen very clearly from this particular hotel. The typhoon caused the fireworks to be canceled and a high turnout at its restaurants was looking rather unlikely.

With a ton of expensive food, particularly fresh seafood, ready to rot in the pantry, the hotel employees were encouraged to call friends and family to come in and chow down for a 50% discount. My student enjoyed a multi-course meal at an Italian restaurant which included gurnard and so I learned another new English word from a student.

From dictionary.com:

gur·nard:

any marine fish of the family Triglidae, having an armored, spiny head and the front part of the pectoral fins modified for crawling on the sea bottom.

New Eyes

This weekend marks the end of a 2-month stint of doing a very big freelance job for my former company. Every weekend in May and the last two weekends in June have been spent doing 8 hours of speaking on the telephone with 63 employees who work at a company that produces electronic components. Saturdays haven't been too difficult because it's only been two hours but Sundays, at six hours, have been relatively tiring and brutal.

While some people may feel that speaking on the phone makes teaching easier, it actually can be a lot harder depending on how you approach the work. For one thing, you have to project a great deal more energy and enthusiasm into your speaking because there is no other way to offer an encouraging atmosphere to the students. You can't smile or use body language to convey approval or foster the students' speaking. If you give it your all, it can be very draining. Since this group of people have been a very nice bunch, I've been giving it my best every weekend despite how tiring it is.

The last few days of this work have largely been made up of a final lesson which requires the students to ask me questions about myself. I already posted about the sort of questions I tend to get asked but the questions in this lesson tend not to all be entirely of that sort since they aren't random questions but part of a planned 5-minute question session. Good students will often pick a theme and ask a lot of questions about it and this company is full of good students.

However, I have been asked a lot of questions about Pennsylvania (where I was born and grew up) and it has made me realize how little I know about commerce and culture there. A good many students have asked me what the biggest food product is and I honestly didn't know what it was.

A look at Wikipedia revealed, much to my surprise, that Pennsylvania is the number one producer of mushrooms in the United States. I was much less surprised to learn that it was the third largest producer of Christmas trees, and fourth largest producer of sod, milk, horses, and nursery plants. Since Pennsylvania means "Penn's woods" and trees are present in great abundance, any product related to plants and trees could only come as a surprise the most ignorant of Pennsylvania residents.

Some of these "products" were a part of my upbringing. My grandmother often did seasonal work at a nursery when I was a child and the library my sister is working at is a beneficiary of funding from the namesake of that nursery. My sister and I were some of the lucky kids who had horses despite the fact that my family was relatively poor. Probably one of the reasons we could afford them was that abundant horses kept prices down a bit.

Researching the answer to this question altered my perspective and broadened my knowledge of my home area in a way that probably would not have occurred if I hadn't lived in Japan. Interacting with students pushes me to see my home area through the eyes of an outsider rather than someone who grew up there. Sometimes Japanese people ask me what the best part about being in Japan is and I often say that it's the ability to see your own country through new eyes.

Tendencies

My oldest private student has been coming for over a year now on Wednesday evenings. In the beginning, she was all alone and I granted her a fair bit of latitude regarding the time she showed up. Since then, she's been book-ended by two other students and now has to be on time.

When I related the change in situation to my student recently, she pondered why Wednesday is such a popular day for scheduling. I told her that Saturday was actually the most popular day followed by Wednesday for my students who are working full-time. Thursday and Friday appointments seem to only be taken up by retired people and housewives. Sunday is simply not popular at all. It appears that most of my students want to use Sunday to really relax and use Saturday to get things done.

The reason that Saturday is such a big day is rather obvious. Wednesday's popularity is a bit odd but my student came up with what she believed to be the answer. She said that accountants are not supposed to work overtime on Wednesdays so it's the day when some people have free time in the evening. It could be that that a day devoted to one category of worker going home on time encourages all other employees to leave on time or at least not work quite so late.

Of course, there is also the fact that more of my students work in accounting than any other type of work. At present, I have 3 students who work full-time in accounting sections among my 12 students. I'm not sure why those in accounting should be so interested in English but they all say that they want to broaden their skills so they can change their work. It makes me wonder if accounting jobs really are as boring as they are reputed to be or if these people are simply paid better and therefore able to shell out the yen for private man-to-man lessons more easily.

My Other Blog

Click the picture to see a larger, easier to read version.

It's not unusual for people to have two blogs but the truth is that I honestly don't have enough content for two real blogs. Well, that's not precisely true. From a certain perspective, my Blogcritic's posts are sort of like a blog for even more long-winded posts than normal (and given how long it takes me to make a point in my regular posts, that's some wordy work).

My other blog isn't really a blog. It's a collection of content for teaching private lessons called "The Home Sensei". I started it for two reasons. The primary reason was that I wanted to share the content I'd been making for my students. Many of my private students don't want to use textbooks but they do want some sort of discussion. Since most of them fall along some continuum of being intermediate in level, they aren't capable of handling intricate discussions of deep topics and aren't able to come up with ideas for hour-long discussions on their own. Finding the topic and keeping it going is my job. Therefore, I've been constructing a variety of cultural discussion lessons which I print out and use to guide the student slowly through various topics. Almost all of them are specifically designed for Japanese students.

The students, by and large, seem to enjoy these types of lessons. Of course, depending on the student's personality, they enjoy certain topics more than others. In general though, I try to avoid "heavy" topics because few of my students are interested in politics or newsworthy issues. This is probably a reflection of their age and gender to some extent and the fact that they aren't coming to me to be brought down by depressing topics. Teachers who find themselves in a situation similar to mine may find my lesson material useful.

One thing you also learn about Japanese students is that the vast majority of those taking conversation lessons either at schools or from private teachers aren't really interested in grammar or practiced sentence patterns. Most of them have already studied plenty of structures and rules in school and what they're looking for is a chance to put it into practice. This is one of the reasons many of them don't like textbooks. It's usually very boring for them to do lessons which focus on a grammar point or key phrases though there are exceptions.

The other reason that I started the second blog was that the failure of my hard drive on my Mac Mini taught me that it'd be a good idea to have my lesson materials backed up elsewhere. Since I can't trust myself to actually back them up all the time, putting them on the web seemed like a good idea.

At the moment, I've got some back-logged content that I'm still working on putting up so there will be a lot of posting at once followed by lulls as I burn out or start to only put up new content. I have noticed that, the more I labor to put up onto that site, the harder it is to get back to this one even though they both serve very different purposes.

In the Dark

Back when I lived in Pennsylvania, we frequently experienced power outages and fluctuations during storms or heavy snowfall. Local accidents would also sometimes take down a power line and cause an extended outage. When I was young, it was sometimes spooky and sometimes rather exciting when this happened. Without the constant chatter of the television and with no external illumination, it was very, very dark and extremely quiet during such outages.

In Tokyo, loss of power is very rare. I think it has happened 3 times in 18 years. The experience is quite different compared to what happens in a rural home. The outages have always been very brief in Tokyo usually lasting only a few minutes at a time. In Pennsylvania, outages could last for up to an hour (or more). Things also are never quiet in Tokyo where your neighbors are about a room away in distance and there's always a road with a fair amount of traffic in earshot. On the rare instances when the power has gone out, my neighbors have come out of their homes to chatter about what has happened amongst themselves.

Power outages are on my mind because there were two brief ones on Saturday. At the time, I was in the middle of a lesson with a student so it was a strange experience. The apartment we live in isn't very well-situated for light so it's quite dark even in the early day with all the curtains open so my student and I were sitting in a very dim room in the late afternoon while it was happening.

It's a somewhat awkward situation to find yourself in because you're often working from a textbook which you can no longer read and the student can't see to write her notes very well.

We soldiered on with the conversation but it made me wonder what I'd do if something like that happened and stuck for a long period of time. I imagine that I'd have to dig out some candles and carry on with the lesson if this were to occur for the duration but it'd seem rather strange, particularly since my candles are stored under my sofa and the student is sitting on it while the lesson is going on. Getting them out would reveal the plethora of items stored under there to the student. There's nothing embarrassing there but things are probably more chaotic-looking than I'd prefer a student witness.

The student that this occurred with didn't seem very put out and I took the opportunity to teach her the vocabulary for "black-out" and "brown-out" and we carried on with the conversation we had been having but I pondered later why the experience is more disconcerting than it ought to feel. I concluded that part of the reason is probably that the experience with students, even when they are being taught in your home, is a relatively formal one. You rarely share any "real life" experiences aside from a cup of tea and a snack on rare occasions when the students bring something and you enjoy it together.

The student and the experience of being in your home when the power goes out aren't paired together and the student's presence complicates your ability to react to a problem. I think the strangeness I feel is the result of the limitations I feel when the student is there in a small "crisis" situation.

Miscommunication

My student brought us treats from the base. Yum!

As I've mentioned previously, one of my private students is currently attending college on a military base. She's just finished her second class and received an "A" in it (as well as the first one). She had the same teacher for both classes and was considering taking her third from the same instructor.

The instructor has had a rather spotty term this year. He's had a lot of personal issues and commitments and canceled a little over half of the lessons in the past term. Due to some other priorities in his life and the expectation that he'll probably have insufficient time to teach a full number of face-to-face classes, he announced that his next class would be carried out as a distance course next term.

Unfortunately, the teacher hadn't confirmed his ability to do this before telling the class about it and it turned out that he couldn't do it. My student had e-mailed him to confirm the situation but he didn't respond to her. She waited some time then tried again and still got no response. Finally, as the deadline for registration drew near, she had to contact someone else at the school to see what the situation was.

The third party contacted her teacher and then got back to her. It turned out the teacher was essentially recommending she not take his (now face-to-face) class because he anticipated having to cancel a lot of classes again and knew she had to drive a few hours to reach the base. If she attended, he would feel uncomfortable about what he was sure would be the necessity of canceling lessons. Since all the other students are part of the military, a cancellation wouldn't inconvenience them in the manner in which it would her.

My student overheard her teacher discussing a replacement for himself during one of her lessons and she learned that the salary for teaching positions at colleges on military campuses are relatively low and it is difficult to find replacement teachers. This is probably why the teacher is continuing to cover the class knowing cancellations are inevitable.

The entire situation is regrettable because it appears it's not the best situation for anyone concerned. The most unfortunate aspect of it is that the teacher's failure to reply to my student's e-mail has lead her to the conclusion that all of this is simply because he doesn't want to teach her because of her 'inadequate' English ability. I am certain, however, that this is all about the teacher's personal schedule and a desire to have maximum flexibility without any nagging concerns about how it'll cause one student trouble.

I spent quite a bit of time in my student's lesson laboring to make her believe this but I'm not sure that I was 100% successful. I believe that her teacher didn't write back to her because he was either too busy or uncertain of his ability to explain the situation in a manner that she wouldn't interpret as a rejection of her personally. That's no excuse for not writing her back and I think there's a decreased chance she'd feel rejected had he actually replied.

One thing that has come up with my student throughout the playing out of this situation (it has been over a week in coming) is that there are serious cultural differences in the roles and responsibilities of teachers and how they look after their students. In Japan, teachers are expected to a far greater extent to look after their students' well-being academically (and sometimes otherwise). It's not unusual for high school teachers, for example, to visit their students' homes to discuss problems or assist students. In the U.S., the responsibility to cope with problems is mainly on the shoulders of the students (and their parents if the students are young).

My student has expressed on two occasions now that she is very frustrated by what she feels is a certain callous disregard for her on the part of her teacher and some of the people who she is dealing with at the college. While I believe she hasn't been treated as well as she deserves (at least in regard to having her e-mail replied to), I don't think that she's been particularly ill-treated or dealt with with malicious intent. Hopefully, part of her experiences as she continues to go to school on the base will be the ability to find some cross-cultural understanding and not to think poorly of herself when such things happen.

The Center of Attention

This Simpsons image was lifted from a Wikipedia entry.

One of my private students has been attending college at a U.S. military base for a few terms now. She has only taken two classes so far because her English ability isn't sufficient to take multiple classes simultaneously. Both of her classes have been taught by the same instructor and have been composed of largely the same relatively small number students so they have gotten to know her through the two courses they've shared.

In her most recent lesson with me, my student told me of a rather unnerving experience she's been having in her lessons. When the teacher asks her a question in class, all the other students turn around so as to face her. This is something that only occurs when she is being addressed so it's not a class-wide phenomenon.

The other students are all African American, male and belong to the military so she already feels very different from everyone else. She believes that they have developed this habit because she often does not understand the questions as the teacher asks them and they are standing ready to "translate" into simpler English for her. While she appreciates their good intentions, she's very embarrassed when this happens and wanted me to advise her on a way to make it stop without alienating her fellow students.

Unfortunately, I could not come up with a means by which she could discourage their turning around en masse to look at her while encouraging them to continue to be helpful and friendly. Any attempt to address their behavior would probably be viewed as a rebuff of their attempts to assist her.

It occurs to me that a little cultural awareness on the part of her classmates would go a long way in this situation. Japanese people want to blend in. The last thing they want to do is to be singled out in such an obvious manner, even when it is done so with the kindest regard.

It Started With Lipstick

This is a piece of clip art. I figure I'd better make that clear.

Sometimes you have your day mapped out and it looks rather busy but generally you're okay with it. Then, one little thing goes wrong and it's as if the universe knocked over the first domino in a sequence of misfortune.

Yesterday, my first domino was a student who wore lipstick. She arrived ten minutes late for her lesson then wanted a 90-minute lesson instead of the 60 she'd planned. Since I'd slotted the hour between her lesson and some telephone freelance work I had to do as my lunch time, the circumstances squeezed my free time down to 15 minutes. Instead of the nice curry I'd planned, I scarfed down leftover chicken on crackers before the phone started ringing.

The first student who I was supposed to talk to on the phone called simply to say that he couldn't call and wanted to call at the end. This robbed me of 15 minutes on the other side of my free time between lessons so I had to rush around and clean up the coffee cups and coffee pot before my next in-person private student came along.

This rushed clean-up resulted in me missing a lipstick smudge on my first student's coffee cup. Bear in mind that I don't wear lipstick so I don't often have to clean it off of cups and it doesn't come off easily in some cases. The top rim of the cup was clean but there was a remnant of the smudge a bit lower down. While I was teaching my second student, I noticed this just as he took a drink and was pretty mortified. What was worse was that I'm sure he noticed as well.

After he left, I was hoping the smudge was a shadow and not lipstick and I tentatively reached for the (mostly full) cup to take it into the kitchen and I knocked it off the table and spilled coffee all over the living room carpet. I had to rush and try to clean it up before it stained the carpet. There's now a huge wet spot in front of the sofa and I'm pretty sure there will still be a stain.

At this time, I'm pretty tired from working all afternoon and early evening and a bit of stressed but I have to get dinner together. I planned on making mustard dill burgers (recipe to be posted soon) and I plop all the ground chicken in the bowl and add the spices but when I get to the dill, the jar is nearly empty. The lid had become dislodged while the jar was in the refrigerator and, since I store spices on their side in my small Japanese refrigerator, most of the spice had leaked out onto the shelf.

Even though I'm tired, I have to hop on the bike and go buy dill since you can't have mustard dill burgers with a tiny bit of dill. After all, you need enough to get a nifty pickle flavor in the burger or it's pretty much a plain burger with mustard mixed in. I crammed the partially completed burger mix into the refrigerator and headed off to the nearest store which I know sells "Gaban" brand spices (same brand as my current jar of dill). I search their shelf three times and there's no dill.

Dill isn't a spice you encounter much in Japanese cuisine so I figure I'll have better luck at Queen's Isetan since it tends to carry more imported food. I hop back on the bike and head to that shop (which is further from my home) and search their shelves. You can guess that the dominoes are still falling at this point. There's no joy for me on the dill front. Having no choice, I head for a store that is even further out which also stocks Gaban spices where I'm nearly certain I bought my first jar of dill.

This store is up an incline and I'm riding at night with a friction lamp on my bike and what I soon notice is a low front tire. This is a recipe for hard pedaling. All the traffic lights go against me as I ride there and most of the pedestrians are absorbed in their cell phones or simply meandering all over the sidewalk in a world of their own. It takes a bit of self-control not to resort to aggressively ring my bell at these dreamy obstacles.

When I get to the last shop and check out the spice rack, of course, I see no dill as I carefully scan all the bottle labels. Given that I'm so sure I bought dill at this place before, I check the titles on the rack in addition to the labels and discover that there is dill but it's hidden behind a misplaced bottle of a more common spice that someone has placed in front of it. Sometimes, fate has to be tricky to keep those dominoes of misfortune tumbling but I was triumphant. I also decided a pint of Lady Borden chocolate ice cream was now in order.

An hour after I shoved my bowl of ground chicken into the refrigerator, I trudge back into the apartment and finish up preparation for the burgers. They're wrapped and ready for cooking later and I go into the bedroom to finally relax. On the way in, I notice that there is a piece of orange plastic lying next to my orange iBook. This does not bode well. I pick up the plastic and it's the door to my CD-ROM drive. Somehow, for the first time ever, it simply fell off.

At this point, I'm thinking that if I even try to snap it back on, it'll probably break but I brave the dangers and it goes back on (seemingly) without incident. I haven't tested it yet so it may yet have an unhappy surprise in mind for me.

I realize that none of this constitutes a tragedy but this was definitely a day of a good many paper-cut-size pains. Days like this wouldn't be so bad if they were counterbalanced by the toppling of dominoes of good fortune on a similar number of days but life just doesn't work that way. Here's hoping today is a better day.

Goodbye Magic English Pill Woman

Those who have served (or are serving) their time in an English conversation school are familiar with having a student (or students) who everyone dreads teaching. They look at their schedule and groan when they notice they have this particular person and are glad when other teachers get stuck with those students.

Back in my days at Ikebukuro Nova, we had several of these students because it was such a big school. One of them was "the seaweed salesman" who always smelled funny, had bad breath and had a lot of trouble stammering out anything. Students with odor issues were always particularly unwelcome because we taught in small cubicles with almost no air circulation.

The most infamous student is one I'll refer to as Mr. M. From all appearances, he looked to be a tired-looking businessman in his middle to late 40's. He always wore a suit and tie but he actually did not work. In fact, he tended to spend all day at the school. At that time, Nova allowed anyone who bought tickets for the conversation lounge to hang out all day there for the price of one 2000-yen ticket. Mr. M. would take one lesson and camp out in the conversation lounge for the remainder of the day.

Mr. M. had some issues. One was that he would unpredictably get angry or annoyed by something a teacher asked or did. This tended to happen as time went by and he attended more often and grew bored with the routine and patterns the lessons followed. He's simply refuse to answer the warm-up questions at the start of lessons after awhile. What was more difficult though was the fact that he seemed to have petit mal seizures or drift into some sort of fugue state in the middle of lessons. His head would drop (his eyes still open) and he'd just be out like a light for seconds to nearly a minute of time.

I'm pretty sure Mr. M. had some psychological issues or possibly some neurological issues. I felt sorry for him but that didn't make teaching him any more enjoyable. It just mitigated the frustration you'd feel about having to deal with him to some extent. Mr. M. was representative of students with personality issues that made teaching them uncomfortable or tiring.

On several occasions, I've posted about a student who has been particularly difficult to teach and she reminded me of all those students we all didn't want to see in our schedules back in my conversation school days. At Nova, fortunately, the impact of dealing with such students was blunted by the fact that you didn't have to teach them all the time as they tended to get shuffled around amongst all the teachers and the fact that other students were present in the lessons most of the time and this blunted their acting on their impulses and allowed you to find a way to work the lesson with the other students.

In my case, as a private teacher teaching one-on-one lessons, there was not going to be any relief from "magic English pill" woman. After struggling to find a lesson plan that was within her skill level, I gave up and decided to just do the best I could to chat with her and forget about actually teaching her.

The last lesson I had with her was around the middle of December and she was really pleased at the end of it because she felt we'd had a really good "conversation". What we had actually done was pass the time with me filling in the huge gaps in her English and letting her sprinkle in Japanese. I felt dirty but she couldn't have been happier.

Since that lesson, she has either been absent or cancelled her lessons. This means she has been occupying a time slot in my schedule and I've been wasting time preparing for lessons she doesn't show up for. Since I only get paid for absences or late cancellations, I haven't been paid for about 50% of this wasted time and effort. What's more, I have to notify the referral agency when she does these things. If I forget or don't bother, they won't pay me so it's not like I don't have to do any work when she doesn't show.

After nearly two months of this, I finally gave in to an impulse I should have acted on after her first lesson and asked the referral agency to find her another teacher. I hesitated to do this early on for a variety of reasons. The primary one was that rejecting her seemed pretty cruel. After all, she couldn't help her spastic nature.

My motives weren't entirely altruistic though. I also didn't want the agency to feel I was going to make pat judgements of students and reject them for fear that they'd refer fewer students to me in the future. Frankly, I also felt this was a personal challenge for me to be more flexible in my approach to teaching. I wanted to believe that I could find a way to adapt to her. In the end, I believe I did though I didn't necessarily enjoy it or respect myself for what felt like "giving up" in the end.

With all her absences (due to helping her son get into school in the U.S.), I could finally tell the referral agency I didn't want to teach her anymore because she was wasting my time. It was a reason that didn't reflect poorly on me nor would it hurt her feelings if she's told the truth.

Corrections That Are Incorrect

Back when I was in college, my Spanish teacher thought it was his job to enlighten us about news of which we should be socially conscious (rather than simply teach us how to speak Spanish). This was around the time that every bleeding heart rock singer and his brother were using the situation in South Africa to advance their media exposure. It was also while Nelson Mandela was still in jail.

This teacher asked the class if they knew what the problem was called and I raised my hand and said "apartheid" pronouncing it correctly and he reiterated my reply by saying "a-par-THede". He clearly was pronouncing it incorrectly but was not so subtly attempting to "correct" me.

Among the things I've overheard many times while working as a teacher is other teachers offering up corrections which are incorrect, giving out incorrect information, serving up dubious theories, and making serious grammatical errors themselves. My husband says he overhears a fair amount of such behavior in his work as well, particularly from certain specific teachers.

One of my former coworkers (who was a total nightmare) had the "dog" and "cat" theory of personality which he felt students needed to know and understand. I never really sat through the whole lecture but multiple exposure to snippets of his bizarre theory indicated that bad people were supposed to have the personality of dogs and good people that of cats (or vice versa). I can only imagine what the students thought of this notion and what it said about western people if they felt it necessary to reverse-anthropomorphize themselves in such a fashion.

Even when the students know the teacher is wrong (as was the case with my Spanish teacher and myself) or full of baloney (as was the case with the "dog" and "cat" guy), they don't say anything. In some cases, they resist out of uncertainty. In others, they don't want to anger the teacher out of fear about how it'll affect their grade or rapport with the teacher. I'm guessing in some cases it's also about being polite.

To be honest, I occasionally misspeak and make a grammatical error (as I'm sure everyone does) but I always correct myself. I think some people are embarrassed to acknowledge a slip of the tongue with self-correction and some people aren't aware that they're making mistakes. Teachers aren't perfect, no matter how educated they are or how hard they try. Still, it's hard not to cringe when you hear someone reinforcing a mistake with students or making their correct English incorrect.

We Passed

As I mentioned before, one of my students is taking a course at a junior college on one of the military bases. I've been assisting her with her homework and she got her final grade a few days ago. I'm pleased to say that she got an "A" in the class though I'm not so happy that she feels my assistance makes this my grade rather than hers.

My student already has a Bachelor's degree in pharmacy from a Japanese school so she has academic experience but she had problems structuring her replies to essay questions. I'm not sure if her problem was related to having studied pharmacy in school and not having to approach tests from the viewpoint of offering opinions (rather than data or research details) or if it has something to do with how Japanese universities structure their tests.

Her main problem was that she didn't talk "on point" when she answered a question. She tended to offer tangential information which was about a similar topic but wasn't addressing the crux of the question. I tried to teach her to meander around the answer less and to simply get right to it.

To offer a more concrete example, she had a question about whether or not the age of criminal culpability ought to be reduced but rather than say that it should or shouldn't and why she felt that way, she talked about a case in Japan that compelled the Japanese government to lower the age of culpability from 16 to 14. While the case was interesting and related to the general topic, it didn't support any particular opinion.

Many of her lessons were spent with my trying to rework her replies so that her wandering around the point became examples for opinions and my helping her see how to address the question as stated. I'm not sure if she actually "got it" but she definitely got a lot better at getting closer to it by the end of the semester. I'm pretty confident that she'll need far less help next time.

I wonder if this is her particular issue or part of a larger tendency among Japanese people to be vague and indirect. One thing that her writing strongly reminded me of was the business letter sample homework that I used to correct for students at my former job. The students were told to accomplish two straightforward tasks; write a letter asking for details about a pair of trekking boots and ask a hotel that they had stayed at to look for a lost address book. In the case of the former, the students would often begin the letter with long, irrelevant personal tales of having to go hiking and needing good boots. In the case of the latter, they'd start off with extended apple polishing which came across as buttering up the hotel staff.

Even though students were explicitly told not to do these sorts of preambles that are common in Japanese letters, they did it anyway because they were uncomfortable getting down to business. The problem my student had wasn't exactly the same thing but both situations were reminiscent of taking the scenic route to the point.

Coddle Me, Or Else

Previously, I posted about a temporary student who was preparing to work in a major international hotel. She had planned for four lessons with me then to sally forth into the exciting new world of information dispersal. It turns out that it was a bit more intimidating than she expected and she decided to come back for another round of lessons.

She told me that she hadn't actually had to offer any information to foreigners yet but she has had to field questions from Japanese guests. The types of questions that she's been asked will be a problem for her if they are in English so she wanted to learn how to deal with the same types of questions in English. I must say though that I felt pretty good when she said, "now I know why you were teaching me those things!" I grilled her pretty hard but now she knows the guests may turn up the heat even higher.

One of the things she asked me about was how to get across various greetings that she is expected to offer guests. People who don't reside in Japan may not know this but it is common for the staff at restaurants and shops to say "irrashaimase" (which is the equivalent of "welcome" in English but there is no direct translation). This is more of an acknowledgement of a customers' or guest's entry into the establishment than a true greeting. My student is required to say "welcome", welcome back", or "good morning/afternoon/evening" to foreign guests when they enter the hotel.

My student wanted to confirm that the translations that were used for these greetings were correct because she noticed that quite a few guests seemed rather embarrassed when such greetings were offered. I explained to her that part of the problem is that westerners aren't used to being addressed each time they enter or exit a place. Usually, people greet you as you approach them for an interaction (like signing into the hotel). If you greet them, they also feel obliged to respond. With multiple greetings from various staff on multiple floors (this is a huge hotel with various annexes), it requires the guest to respond again and again or feel rude in not replying.

The most interesting thing she told me about this greeting business was unrelated to dealing with foreigners and had to do with a Japanese guest. It seems that the hotel believes repeat guests deserve special recognition. For new guests, it's okay to simply say "welcome" and "welcome back". For repeat visitors, the staff are supposed to recognize their faces and say "good morning/afternoon/evening." Even new staff members have to do this and it is accomplished by having pictures of those guests' faces and making the staff memorize them.

In one instance, a new employee failed to recognize a middle-aged Japanese businessman who was a repeat guest and he was so incensed by the young woman's failure to offer a more familiar greeting (she just said "welcome") that he insisted the hotel fire her. The hotel moved her out of a position where she would greet guests but it is amazing how childish this man was. When an employee failed to coddle him in the fashion he expected, he tried to get her fired for a very inconsequential "slight".

Textbook Speak

As I've mentioned before, one of my students is studying Criminal Justice at a college on a military base. She's taking a class in Juvenile Justice and has the same sort of textbook that you use at most colleges. It's extremely difficult for her to understand in large part because of the specialized vocabulary but that's not the hardest part for her. She can look up random words and get translations.

The harder part for her is that she has issues de-scrambling the sort of language that textbook writers feel obliged to use. Sometimes, the grammar in the sentences is contorted such that you have to read it more than once to understand the point. This is often the case even for native speakers. One of the sentences which she had particular difficulty with was something which said something along the lines of 'a framework from which to study (a topic)'. I can't recall the rest of the sentence, unfortunately, but it was clear that the way in which the sentence was written was awkward (though grammatically correct) in order to avoid the use of "I" or "we".

When I was in college, I remember specifically being told that one was never to use "I" or "we" in academic writing. I don't know why that was the case but, to this day, when I write anything, it's in the back of my mind that I should try to avoid using such types of sentences.

Besides the tendency of textbooks to use contorted grammatical structures, they also seem to go out of their way to use uncommon vocabulary. I'm no slouch in the vocabulary department and my husband is even less of a slouch than me but the book I'm currently reading, Adaptation and Human Behavior, often has us both clicking our way over to dictionary.com. I'm reading this book, incidentally, as a nice little palate cleanser between novels though the number of $20 words is really clogging up the mental pipes as I try to slog through the book.

I'm not talking about jargon. In fact, I understand the jargon pretty well having studied psychology and appreciate the need to use a word like "phenotype" because it saves the writer from using multiple words to describe "body type" and it fits in with the phenotypical body descriptions (ectomorphic, mesomorphic, endomorphic) aka somatotypes. Now, wasn't that far more confusing than saying body types which tend to be thin, muscular, and fat?

At any rate, I don't take issue with this type of jargon because I know that the ideas underlying them are more sophisticated than "thin"," fat", and "muscular". In some cases, using simpler words undermines the meaning the writing is trying to get across. In other cases, however, it seems to have little to do with conveying words which carry more depth of meaning than more commonly-used vocabulary. For instance, what is the point of using a word like "adduce" instead of "cited"? There is no added nuance carried by "adduce" over "cite". It's just a less commonly-used word.

I'm never sure if academics sit down with a thesaurus and find new and uncommon words in an attempt to appear more sophisticated or to use words that are less common to spice up their dry content, or if they use these words because their exposure to vocabulary is extraordinary. Either way, for both my student and I, this is sometimes a pain in the ass.

Student Roster

Sometimes I post knowing what I say is of interest to family and/or friends and sometimes I know it's mainly of interest to those who also live in Japan. So, I know not every post I write is going to interest everyone who reads. This one is mainly geared toward using this blog as a record of this particular time period in Japan. It'll allow me to look back on my situation a year from now and remember what it was like. For those who are curious (particularly my friends back home), it may give them a better idea of the types of people who seek out private teachers and give them an idea of who I'm spending time with (and when).

At the moment, I have 12 private students and teach in my apartment between 9-13 hours a week. Most students take one-hour lessons once a week on a regular basis with a few exceptions. Here's the roster:

Wednesday:

(5:15 pm) 18-year-old university student who is studying French as her major. She works 8 hours a week at a coffee shop behind the counter and loves watching "24". Every week, I ask her what she saw on "24" from the DVDs that she rented. Her English level is low-intermediate mainly because she's relatively passive and gives short replies. She does seem to understand most of the questions I ask her. She's friendly but not effusive.

(6:30 pm) 40-something "office lady" type who works for a newspaper company that also arranges exhibitions around Japan. She's married to a man who works for Meiji chocolate company and her income is mainly used to fund travel abroad. Both she and her husband particularly enjoy nature and travel to sightsee or hike in national parks. She told me once that, due to a misunderstanding when filling out her customs declaration in New Zealand, she had to pay a 50,000 yen (about $500) fine because they're very strict about bringing in your own hiking boots. Apparently they are very concerned about bacteria being transported in and harming the ecosystem. This student was my very first private student after quitting my full-time job. She is a solid intermediate level. She understands what I ask her quite well and responds at length but often can't recall the necessary vocabulary quickly. She often pauses and taps her head while she tries to think of words. She's quite nice but very laid back.

Thursday:

(3:00 pm) 45-year-old housewife with 2 sons and a husband who has 2 jobs. This is the student that I wrote the "Magic English Pill" post about but she has since improved. She is hyperactive, effusive and very, very friendly. In fact, she asked me to hug her at the end of her last lesson because she'd read on the internet that it was "free hug" day on November 8. I documented her English skills pretty well in my original post but she has since come to accept repetition and some structure in the lesson. I'm much more positive about my future lessons with her now.

(6:00 pm) 64-year old man who has two grown sons and is married. He worked for Japan's major phone company all his life and retired several years ago. He now works freelance teaching computer and cell phone skills to elderly people at local community centers and proctors exams that allow people to obtain various qualifications. His level is low but in a very specific fashion. He can speak well about everyday matters but has very stubborn grammar problems and almost no ability to retain new information. He's nice enough but his lessons tend to be pretty tedious topic-wise. He spent an entire lesson talking about how he brushed his teeth. He chooses the topic he wants to talk about, not me. As is the case with many men in Japan, he's crazy about golf and has spent many lessons discussing the minutiae of his playing. He's my only male student.

Friday:

(1:00 pm-temporary, only until the end of November) 45-year-old former housewife who is about to start working at an information kiosk at a major international hotel and is taking a few lessons to warm her up for the job. She's the most lovely, gentle person I could hope to meet. Her manner is friendly with none of the "fake" or needy overtones you sometimes get from students. She's lived abroad in English-speaking countries for several years and has excellent understanding but sometimes spotty grammar. I wish she were continuing as a permanent student but she probably won't really need lessons once she starts work.

(4:00 pm) 23-year-old flower shop employee who studied Islamic History in university. She's very shy but nice. Her English level is the lowest among my students and she can only briefly answer the most basic of questions. Her purpose for studying English is unclear because she seems to be happy at the flower shop (despite the fact that it doesn't utilize her education in any way) and doesn't want to advance her career. This student is semi-regular. She comes 2-4 times a month.

(7:00 pm) 41-year-old "housewife" who is now a college student studying Criminal Justice at a college on one of the U.S. military bases. She now takes 90-minute lessons or two hours depending on her need. She's not very housewife-like in her habits. She is a mixture of timidity coupled with fierce determination that has propelled her past her insecurities and fear. I'm so impressed by her that I often help her for free outside of the lesson time doing internet reasearch to help her with her assignments or correcting her homework on my own.

Saturday:

(2:00 pm) 44-year-old company employee who works in accounting. She has two children and is the mother of the girl who was featured in a cheerleading squad documentary I mentioned awhile ago in "Joyless Practice". She told me that she doesn't live with her husband but I'm not sure exactly why and don't want to ask the personal questions necessary to find out. She has lots of grammar problems and is working extremely hard on her own to improve her TOEIC score so she can move on to a different line of work. She does a great deal of homework, writes a diary in English, and has been reading "The Boxcar Children" series of children's books to help her improve her English. She's very friendly and a bundle of energy. With her situation, I don't know how she manages to do all the things she does.

(3:30 pm) 24-year-old insurance company worker who would like to learn English for travel abroad. I've only had one lesson with her so it's hard to really get a sense of her. She seems relatively calm and composed and that's pretty much all I could conclude.

(5:00 pm) 33-year-old company worker who works for a major electronics company. Her work is mainly centered around organizing exhibitions of her company's products worldwide. She's married to an accountant and comes from a large family and would like to have a lot of children one day herself. She needs English because her work requires her to travel abroad for her work. She's also studying Chinese. Among my students, she seems to spend the most time at her office and often is in poor health because she works so much overtime. I mentioned her situation in my post "Japanese Working Style". She's actually the next student I expect to lose because she's had to cancel a few lessons because of her health and I think her motivation is relatively low despite the need for English in her work.

Sunday:

(3:00 pm) 40-year-old company worker who works in the accounting section of an architectural firm. She currently hates her job and told me she was going to quit last week. She's studying English mainly for career advancement. She is unusual in that she has a career counselor to help guide her to improve her situation. It's even more unusual that he's Turkish (though he speaks fluent Japanese). She can express herself very well and tends to spend about half of each lesson complaining about her job but has vocabulary limits and grammar problems. She's the only student I've got who bought her own textbook so she can pre-prepare before the lesson.

Random days and times:
31-year-old freelance translator who makes subtitles for mostly English (sometimes other languages) movies for the Japanese audience. This student comes about once a month and we just go over transcripts of movies and watch movie clips. I answer any questions she has about vocabulary or meaning. She's nice but it's hard to develop a really good rapport with her since we rarely spend much time discussing personal topics and I see her infrequently.

I don't have any lessons on Monday and Tuesday because those are my husband's days off so they are my days off as well. In another year, if I'm still doing this, it'll be interesting to compare schedules.