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Other than writing for 4cr I have a full time job as an English teacher. This year I switched to teaching elementary school. The kids are great but it is an exhausting job. Anyway, recently I decided to do a lesson about family structure. To teach English words like Father, Mother, Brother, Sister, etc.

As with a lot of lessons I do with first graders, I have to make it as interesting as possible or I can’t hold their attention for more than about 7 seconds. Kids this age love video games. Especially Mario games, so when teaching the word “brother” I decided to use a word they already know from the game “Super Mario brothers. However as it turned out, the one who got the lesson was me. Here’s what happened:

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It’s long past Halloween, but I thought I would share a little anecdote with you. As usual when a Western holiday comes around, I plan an English lesson around it. For the last part of my Halloween lesson, I gave the kids the above handout and let then design their own Jack o’ Lantern face. Many students wanted to put their favorite characters on the pumpkin, like Spongebob or Doraemon, but by far the most popular choice was the face of Mario. In some classes more than half of the kids were making Mario. It’s cute and all but I wanted to see the students do some original designs. So in the next class, while explaining the activity I told them not to draw a picture of Mario but rather to draw a picture of their best friend. One little boy handed in this picture…

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Today was my first day at my new elementary school. It was also my first time to interact with the students. It is summer vacation now but there were kids in school because today is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. A perfect day, apparently, for the new American teacher to introduce himself.

It stated out good. I arrived early and played with the younger students who where thrilled to see a brand new face. One student showed his approval by punching me in the crotch. Then he smiled, obviously satisfied, and gave me a hug. I played with the kids for about 20 minutes before the high energy of the kids combined with the lack of air conditioning (or really any ventilation) made me retreat to the teachers room. The kids kept calling me to come back, wanting to spend more time with their new teacher. As I said it was a good start.

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Learning English is an uphill battle. All Japanese are required to study English in Jr. high School and high school (if they choose to go to high school). Many will continue to study English beyond this compulsory period. There is a flourishing industry for English learning books, videos, CDs, software and countless other things. Yet despite all of this Japan has a very low rate of English acquisition. How could this be? That is a big question and one I will not tackle in this post. What I will talk about is the fact English is very popular in Japan even if it is not used correctly.

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You know you have seen his picture on t-shirts all over. Jim Fitzpatrick’s two-tone drawing of the controversial revolutionary Che Guevara is one of the best known images in the world. But I hadn’t seen it in Japan much. That is until this morning.

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Last week my school had a “goodbye party” for the teachers who are leaving my school. Whenever there is an event of any significance someone will plan a drinking party. Drinking parties are a vital part of Japanese co-worker relations and I was happy to be part of one.

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It’s that time of year again. It’s the time that teachers both fear and look forward to depending on how they feel about their current school and co-workers. At this time of year, Japanese teachers will find out what schools they will be teaching at next term. About half of the teachers at any given school will stay and the other half will be transferred.

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I was so excited about the potential of the English Training Game for the Nintendo DS. This title has been in the top 10 best selling games list every week since its release. This made me very happy, kids and adults were studying without being forced and appeared to be enjoying it. But as you can see from the above screen it’s not perfect. During the training sessions, after the warm-up, the words “Let’s Training!” flash on the screen to let you know that the main game is about to begin. Keep in mind that these words are not being specifically taught to the player, they are just on a menu screen, but in a software package aimed at teaching proper English it is very disappointing to see. People trust that what is found in these games is correct grammar and many will take it as read that this is correct. This “let’s” thing is very common “Japanese-English” and I always have to remind my students to not say, “Let’s English study” or “Let’s reading a book.” If you translate these phrases directly, it makes sense in the Japanese grammar system but sounds bizarre in English. I can’t believe “Let’s Training!” Made it through quality control. It’s sad to see that people are being misled, but I suppose it’s good for my job security as an English teacher. I won’t be replaced by a video game anytime soon.

My birthday was on the third and when I went to my Eikaiwa class I saw some of my students giggling behind the chalkboard. I asked them what they were doing and they said “just a moment”. After what turned out to be several moments they turned the board around and revealed the above drawing. I was so touched that I didn’t even notice at first that they had written “March 3th”. First I thanked them for their drawing but I knew there was a lesson to be taught so I explained that it should be “3rd” rather than “3th”. They asked my why it wasn’t 3th and I had to agree with them that it would make a lot more sense if it did follow that pattern. I just told them that if that were always the rule, then “second” would be “tooth”, and I pointed at my teeth. Yes, it was a lame joke, but perhaps that will help them to remember it.

In various teaching books I have come across activities where students can fill in a caption to a picture or the word bubbles for comic books. These are suggested for high school students due to the difficulty in creating original stories. But I still wanted to give it a try with my jr. high school classes. I knew I needed to use something familiar to them but also encourage them to create their own dialogue. I decided to take a few panels from the popular manga (comic) series Doraemon, and see what my students would come up with.

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