Classic Complications

As far as Minami classes have been so far, we've had a lot of fun. And a lot of complications.

As the new year started, I did my obligatory self-introduction. At the other schools, I forewent the presentation and asked them what they wanted to know. The short answer - nothing. At Minami, I gave my presentation, and then at the end of class, I gave a speech in Japanese about not fearing mistakes, their biggest problem. Hearing me suddenly speak Japanese surprised some of them. I didn't want to reveal my abilities, but I also didn't want to spend the rest of my time standing in front of a crowd of people that know the answer, but won't even say "yes". Unfortunately, this caused a lot of the students to try to talk to me in Japanese ever since and didn't really make them less quiet. Also, by my third and fourth times, I really botched up the speech and started talking in circles. Maybe it had some impression on someone. Maybe.

I decided to have the new students do their own self-introductions. In a moment of brilliance, I decided to try to teach the students about American school. So even though we had the classes split in half as a new system we just implemented, I had them all gather up so I could do a PowerPoint. Mostly they didn't understand and it was probably a waste of time. This cut our class time dramatically. After the presentation, one of the teachers took half the students to the rest of their room to finish the schedule.

Except there were two things left to do, and time for barely one. I had decided it was best to try to weed out some common mistakes early. So I made a presentation about common mistakes. This was next on our list, followed by preparations for the students to make their own self-introductions.

I knew the other teacher would do the preparations first and I should have just followed suit, but I went ahead and did the mistakes instead. This caused our schedule to become shuffled for the next month and then some. It didn't cause anything catastrophic, but it was annoying planning for two sets of classes and remembering who did what when. Especially with two weeks of breaks in between for whatever reason.

The presentations were pretty boring. Especially because they all misinterpreted "something interesting about me" to mean "something I am interested in" which basically boils down to a K-Pop band or Justin Bieber / One Direction.

I gave the students the opportunity to pick their own English names, but instead they simply wrote down their own names. Some of the more creative students added "chan" to their name, and the really creative 1% came up with nicknames. Unfortunately, they never used these names again. Some of them that wrote down their own names even continued to use the other half of their name so it was completely useless. I foolishly made my name chart based on the names they choose, so when they turned in homework, it was rather difficult to figure out who was who.

I also, for some reason, decided to do a less on waseieigo and teach them that not every katakana word is perfect English. Unfortunately, this turned out to not have that much to do with English, but it was kind of interesting none-the-less. Hopefully.

The kids might not have learned a lot of English, but at least they learned some Japanese.