“Teaching” English

Since I am “at that age,” I often look at my wee students and want to hug them or squeeze their little potato feet. Imagine my surprise to discover that the sentiment might go both ways – this week, I have been felt up by not one, but two of my own young students. Now, […]

Any ex-patriot will tell you how strange it is to live abroad during one of your country’s big holidays. “Strange” is, of course, a shallow and overreaching term – in some cases, there is a sense of guilt (“Woah. Was last week Thanksgiving? I didn’t hear anything about it …”) or a sense of loss […]

Each week, I bring new things to my children’s classes. Right from the start I enjoyed being silly and using strange voices to maintain interest when I drilled them with flashcards but, as anything, my teaching “shtick” evolves. I now enjoy teaching letters and their corresponding phonic sounds through musical scales (this exercise borne out […]

Disclaimer: unlike this post’s inspiration, “Overheard in Osaka” is not meant to denigrate or mock anybody quoted herein. I am well aware that an entire site could probably be made about the mistakes I myself make in Japanese. That said, here is a collection of some of the things my students have said this week […]

Monday was a bad day. Prior to a couple of weeks ago, I was the teacher of 6 great classes and 1 class of jerks. I’ve mentioned the jerks a couple of times so far. I also teach a class of cuddly 2 year olds, a class of absolutely adorable 5 year olds, 2 classes […]

Last week, 5 year olds at my school learned about barn animals. This involved singing “Old MacDonald” and imitating said animals complete with barnyard sounds. I tore into this task with gusto – I love my 5 year olds and will take any chance I can to play with them, regardless of how silly I […]

Just for you, P-Jay …We here at my English school not only categorize typical Japanese pronunciation mistakes (See “One, Two, Three … WHORE!”: Part Ichi) but sometimes we discover brand new ones. Today I taught my class of adorable, wriggly 2 year-olds again. Kazuki, the wriggliest of them all, bumped his nose on the folding […]

During our initial training to teach at my school, our trainers alerted us to Japanese pronunciation errors we might come across. The infamous “l/r” issue is indeed a reality – in our lessons, there are prates of flied lice, soaps on lopes, crassical concerts and lipped stockings galore. A lesser known pronunciation error of the […]

Each day, the names of the adult students taking classes are printed out on a sheet and taped to the wall of the teacher’s lounge. At this tender stage in my Japanese cultural training, I still find many of the names foreign. Worse, I often have a hard time telling the difference between male and […]

New knowledge gleaned the other day that made me happy; in the olden Japanese days – before the katakana English word “pinku” was used – “momo” was the word used to describe the color “pink.” 🙂