Do I teach children?
It’s Wednesday afternoon, I’m in a carpeted room, scrambling on my hands and knees to find a little foam letter R. If I don’t find this letter then I can’t spell Mahiro, and if I spell Mahiro in 30 seconds instead of 20, Mahiro-chan’s little four year old mind begins to wander toward the first thing she can pick up and throw at me. All I need is a R…she eyes an orange plastic cone…where the hell is the R…she winds up…ah-hah, here it is, finally! I’m struck in the left temple and she looks at me like I just dropped a second base pop-fly. “Where were you,” her eyes say? Eyes speak every language.
Okay let’s sing a song, let’s find something blue, and let’s say something in English, anything in English! Let’s face it, a few times a week I’m a really expensive babysitter with zero authority. Mahiro can’t even speak Japanese yet I’m supposed to teach her English? Precisely.
Teaching children poses many challenges, of course, but I have to say that teaching every age group at the same time is making me a well-rounded teacher. I’ve been using the same games I play with children with the adults. Of course I don’t tell them that they’re playing kid’s games. That might ruin their enjoyment since these are serious Japanese businessmen. And they do enjoy the games, sometimes more than the kids I think. Adults are easy, though.
And the kids keep coming. There must have been some memo that went around Hitachi that there’s this new foreign guy in town who speaks English really well. He can speak English all day if he wants to. So if you stick your son or daughter in his English speaking presence, some of that golden language is bound to rub off on them, right? Sounds like a good theory, but my company’s corporate genius failed to equip me with the essential Japanese phrases: sit down, come here, put that down, give that back, why can’t you share?, and stop being such a six-year-old jerk. Every two weeks I have a new student. When will it stop?
There are days that are great, where we’re playing games and speaking English, and there are days where I know the kids just need a nap. There’s too much pressure on kids here. Their parents are being jerks by not letting them be kids, so they sometimes act like jerks to me, but mostly each other. It’s fun being a kid. I mean it looks like fun to me to throw stuff, run around, and learn a foreign language like they’re brushing their teeth.
Tags: Teaching English
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