While I’ve been (and still am) waiting for my websites to move to their new web host, I’ve had some time to catch up on my favorite podcasts. One of those podcasts is from Gaijin-in-Japan.com, and recently in Mike’s 82nd podcast, we got treated to this brilliant prank call to an AEON English school in Japan:
There are lots of similar ones on ArnoldCalls.com, and you’ll find a load of them here on YouTube, too. Go on, treat yourself to a few laughs! 
Time for a quick rant about my job as an English teacher in Japan. Before continuing, please read my disclaimer.
This post is about children who forget to bring a pencil to class. Do I even need to say more? Surely that’s like going swimming without you’re trunks! If you’re going to school, take a pencil. It really shouldn’t be any more complicated than that, right?
Why then, do I have kids who repeatedly forget to bring a pencil? I’m going to assume that they have two bags; one for regular school, and one for English class.. but only one pencil case, and you know which bag that’s in.
After one of my seven-year-olds forgot his pencil for the umpteenth time, I decided to teach him a lesson. Instead of lending him a pencil as I usually do, I sharpened my own pencil and deliberately broke the tip off it. I gave him the tiny broken pencil tip and told him to write with it for the rest of class, and if he didn’t like it (which he clearly didn’t), he should bring his own pencil the next week.
One week passed and back he came, again without a pencil.
So, what can you do? In the Eikaiwa industry, making your student write with a tiny, broken piece of lead is such a horrendous punishment that any other school would have a disciplinary meeting with me and put me under observation! In the Eikaiwa industry, disciplining students doesn’t go much further than having the secretary ask the student to be a little nicer… and to bring a pencil. Why? Because parents pay for their children to enjoy learning English, not actually to learn English. At least that’s the way it seems. Either way, they don’t pay for their children to be told off, and it makes you wonder if ESL in Japan is a big joke.
What did I do? Well, I stepped out of the classroom and told his mum directly, in front of the other mothers, that he had forgotten his pencil (and homework) again, and to make sure he comes to class prepared next time. If you can’t discipline the kid, embarrass the mother!
I just learned from my wife that she has sent off a request for a free Disney English System sample DVD. It’s widely accepted that if you want your child to be proficient in a foreign language, then you should start their learning from a young age.
The last decade has seen Japan’s “English conversation” schools fall over themselves trying to recruit students at a younger and younger age. For example, when I started working at ECC in 1998 their Kids English World program was really taking off, with classes for kids as young as four. The next year, selected teachers were picked and given “special” training for their new course for three year olds. NOVA stepped up and offered classes for toddlers and every other school followed.
The youngest kids I have taught are one and a half year olds, and while fun to watch, you don’t really get much out of them. The argument is however, that because they are listening to native English, they will “absorb it like a sponge”, especially picking up on rhythm and intonation.
So, it’s not really a surprise that Disney is pushing this philosophy hard, offering two programs – one for pregnant mothers, and the other for 0-4 year olds.
I’ll reserve judgement until I see the sample, but my initial reaction is I don’t want my son, little Riku, sounding like Mickey Mouse… or even worse… Donald Duck!
When I was a kid, thirteen to be exact, Was (Not Was) released a song called ‘Walk the Dinosaur’, which was a huge hit in 1988. It’s one of those songs you don’t forget, and I tend to sing it to myself every time one of my elementary school students chooses the ‘dinosaur’ from a bunch of stamps I use for homework and rewarding the kids at the end of each lesson.
Today, in my 4th-6th grade class, without prompting, the kids all started singing the song along with me, and after the first time, they all wanted the ‘dinosaur’ stamp, and we kept singing the song! I found it hysterically funny that a group of Japanese kids, who weren’t even born when Walk the Dinosaur was released, would not only find it funny, but actually make a conscious effort to remember the words and sing it aloud with dinosaur gestures!
If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, it would be that children do pick up on teacher ‘chatter’, that is the things an ESL teacher says to him or herself during a lesson which the kids aren’t expected to understand. I often talk or sing to myself when I teach…”Now where did I put my pencil?”, “Wow, he actually did his homework this week.”, “Rolling, rolling, rolling, keep them wagons rolling… Rawhide!”
When you say the same things repeatedly every lesson, directly or indirectly, children remember. So, today’s tip is to be aware of what you’re saying, make sure you say it every week, and in a few months your kids will be saying it, too!
“Kancho is the ancient art of clasping your hands together, and playfully poking your friend or enemy,…in the rear. It is also called “The Friendly Enema”, and is practiced by children in schoolyards and classrooms around the world. Kancho.org is dedicated to spreading the good news about Kancho.” Source: www.kancho.org
When Japanese kids first started shoving their fingers up my bum about ten years ago, I was more confused than shocked. I mean, why would they want to? I still don’t know, but it’s clear that they take great pleasure in doing so. While I’m still learning to avoid it, Az of www.gaijinsmash.net, and surely the king of kancho has mastered the art of kancho evasion. If you’re thinking of coming to Japan, this is his response:
As I said before, it’s a good experience. You learn a lot about yourself, Japan, and your own country (just by being away from it and seeing how others perceive it – not just Japanese, but all the people from different countries I’ve met while here). I’m definitely glad I came. Whether you want to come or not is up to you, but don’t let a few possible fingers up the ass deter you. Lighten up, and see the humor in it. And now that you know, you can do as I did, climbing Mt. Fuji and fine-tuning my Kancho Sense™ to a precise science. And then maybe you too can make a website about kids trying to grab your dick.
If you think everyone is making too much fuss about kancho, watch these videos from YouTube and think again.
It seems kancho-ing someone in public is not as acceptable as perhaps it used to be, so they’ve made a video arcade game called Boong-Ga Boong-Ga so people can kancho all they like. I don’t know about you, but I’m worried my kindergarten kids will start training on this thing, and as one commenter said on TokyoMango, “I wonder if they’re ever gonna make a Nintendo Wii version of this game?” Now that is a scary thought! Read more about Boong-Ga Boong-Ga at Seanbaby.com.
I’ve been teaching at Japanese kindergartens for years now, and I always have a lot of fun. The key to success in teaching these classes is to be fun and energetic. While some “proper” teachers complain that they came to Japan to “teach”, and not dance around like clowns, I believe that if your style of teaching is entertaining then your students are going to learn a whole lot more from you… or at least have a blast trying!
Kindy kids are full of energy and really enjoy their English classes if you make them fun. So, with that in mind, I give you Supa Gaijin!
If you can’t view the video, you can see it here at youtube.com. Thanks to Japan Probe for bringing this video to my attention.
‘Macho’ Joe and ‘Gorgeous’ Rod have a few videos up on www.youtube.com if you search for “supa gaijin”. You’ll see they’re a right pair of nutters, maybe having too much fun in Japan, but they’ve inspired me to try out some new tricks next time at kindy… if I can get hold of that music somewhere!
Try www.supagaijin.com for more on Joe and Rod. The link doesn’t work for me but hopefully that’s just temporary.
I had intended to write about something completely different but I came across this video which I just had to post here. It’s a Japanese game show in which if you laugh, you get the cane. What do they laugh at? Well, although they try their best to keep quiet, it’s hard not to crack up when watching this guy try to speak English…
If you can’t view the video, you can see it here at youtube.com.
Since I’m back to school tomorrow, I’ve been thinking again about my ESL lessons, and remembered an interesting moment from last term. I was getting frustrated with one of my kindergarten classes so right at the start of the lesson I told the children that if they crawl under the tables they will lose all their points.
I usually give my kindy kids four points at the start of the lesson next to their names on the board. Each point represents a stamp that they get on their ’stamp card’ at the end of class. When they finish their stamp cards they get a nice present. With the older kids, I start them on two points which encourages them to earn more points as well as be in a position to lose the ones they already have if they misbehave, but the kindy kids seem to respond better to losing points and then earning them back.
Anyway, I was in quite a friendly mood when I gave this ‘lose all your points’ warning and since it was the start of class, some of the kids hadn’t arrived yet. So, I was amazed to see the children pass on my warning to those late comers as they came into the classroom. Needless to say, not one kid went under the tables.
The next week however, while singing the ‘Hello Song’, H-kun snuck away from the group and started for the tables. I quickly stopped the song, and asked him if he remembered last week’s warning. Suddenly, one of the girls said “Eh? You mean we can’t go under the tables this week either?”
The moral of this little story is that young children need to be reminded constantly of the rules. This doesn’t mean disciplining them after they do something wrong, but rather reviewing the class rules before they have a chance to.
If you aren’t already doing this, give it a try! You’ll probably have a trouble free and enjoyable lesson!
I was just looking around at the Japanese videos on youtube.com, and came across the following ‘English lesson’. I know we talk about using role-play to teach English, and how chants are a good way to remember phrases, but come on! This is just silly! I must confess that I’ve never seen anything quite like this on Japanese TV, but I guess it must exist. Maybe I’m not up early enough to join in the morning TV English aerobics sessions.
If you can’t view the video, you can see it here at youtube.com.
During the last couple of weeks, I’ve broken the golden rule of teaching English to children by speaking Japanese! Heaven help me! I’ve started each lesson with a few minutes of chit-chat with the kids and I’m really enjoying it!
I just ask them what they’ve been doing lately and they are really forthcoming in telling me their news. I learned that one of them has just had a baby sister, another got a unicycle from her grandmother as an early birthday present, and another just had an American teacher stay at his house for the weekend as part of an international language exchange.
I find this little bit of banter relaxes the kids and helps me connect with them more. I also find it very refreshing as children generally have positive things to say all the time. We talk about birthdays and presents, friends, school, TV, video games, all sorts really.
Today, Sumo-boy pulled me close and whispered in my ear that the frogs were having babies. He said there was frog spawn all around his house and he couldn’t wait to see them ‘hatch’. I asked him if liked frogs and he pulled away with the most digusted look on his face and hollered the Japanese equivalent of “Ergh! Yuck! Blubber! Spit! Whoaaah! They freak me out!”
Recently, my first grade elementary kids have been losing their teeth. Before class, M-chan was running around the waiting room showing everyone her wobbly tooth. The next thing I know, her mum grabs it and yanks it out! I yelped ‘Ouch!’ and asked her if it hurt and she smiled with a mouthful of blood and told me it didn’t. Later in class, I asked them if they have the Tooth Fairy in Japan. After my poor explanation I think they imagined Santa Claus with wings stealing children’s teeth while they sleep. But anyway, it seems in Japan, if one of your top teeth falls out, you are supposed to throw it on the roof. If it’s one of your bottom teeth, you… just chuck it on the ground. Well, I think that’s what they meant!
So while it’s considered wrong to speak anything but English in an ESL class, I do feel that this little experiment has helped me bond with the kids, and they seem to enjoy the classes more, too!
Imagine you have to commute home every night by train. The train is packed so you can’t sit down and you’ve already read the day’s newspaper. You forgot to bring a book and the batteries are dead in your walkman. It’s dark outside so you can’t stare out the windows and you’ve read the same advertising board a thousand times. What are you going to do? Study English, that’s what!
Welcome to modern Japanese transportation, where you can learn the English language by train! Today’s lesson is the difference between ’service’ and ‘free’, with the delightful Katie Sensei…
If you can’t view the video, you can see it here at youtube.com.
Earlier this year I started on ESL-Kids.com, a website that offers printable flashcards and worksheets for teachers like me – ESL teachers on the front lines everyday, faced with an army of children and only a few ABC cards to defend ourselves with.
It was a slow start, but recently I’ve given ESL Kids a facelift, added a lot of new flashcard sets and made a worksheet generator. Just today in fact, I uploaded alphabet and body part cards.
I have a great team of artists who are busy drawing new flashcards, and more and more people are visiting the site for the first time. I’m even starting to get emails from various countries requesting new songs, pictures and what not.
There’s nothing more rewarding than positive feedback, and I’ve had plenty of that for my other websites. For example:
Wow! These are great! Thanks for making it easier to get math worksheets for my 2nd and 5th grade children.
I am a sister in high school making worksheets for my sister in elementary school … I really think that this website is a good way to help her learn! I would reccomend this website to every teacher and every parent I know!
I would just like to say thank you for your site. My son who’s 7 years old struggles with his handwriting. I have been looking on different sites for something to help him and this is the best one I’ve found so thank you again. P.S. i also appreciate it being free.
Hello my 3 year old wanted to do dot to dot words but had bought the ‘wrong magazine’. Precocious yes. You just saved us from a tantrum! And she can have a go at all of her cousins’ names. She is very pleased with herself!
This is an excellent resource to help improve student handwriting and word recognition.
I am thrilled so find your website and have made several worksheets for my kindergarteners to practice their names. What a time saver!!
Just used the Writing Wizard worksheets to make some name practice sheets for my special needs students. What a user-friendly and useful resource. Many thanks!
I just found your website. I really love the idea of being able to create custom worksheets for my son. I tried a practice worksheet containing individual letters, and he loved it.
I work for the Head Start program in Marion, Ohio. Just wanted to know if it would be OK for us to distribute this to the families that we work with that are interested in helping their children learn how to write.
It makes my day to get messages like these. Sometimes, I get so much enjoyment out of working on the websites, that I actually forget that people use the worksheets in real life! They are actually used in homes and classrooms, and the children using them enjoy them and learn from them, too!
I look forward to ESL-Kids.com growing and bringing happiness and knowledge to more children, just as my other sites have done so far.
I was looking through some of my old things and found a postcard from the first school I taught at in Japan. When a potential customer had taken a trial lesson, the teacher was supposed to fill in this postcard and it would be sent to that student. I had to shrink the picture a bit for the web, but if you look closely you’ll see a classic mistake.
Okay, let’s zoom in on that…
Yep, this was made by one of the biggest English schools in Japan, a leader in English language education, a company that thousands of people across the nation study at. Apparently they printed thousands of these postcards before anyone noticed the mistake. Of course, they were withdrawn quickly and I doubt if any were actually sent out to students… not that they’d be able to read it anyway.
After they were withdrawn they were used as scrap paper. Who would have thought that this little embarrassment would appear on the internet years later!
According to an NHK report in 2000, Japan has the largest commercial English language education market in the world, valued at $20 billion. So, you would expect most Japanese to be fairly proficient in English, right? Wrong! Official TOEIC figures for 1997-1998 showed Japan to have the lowest average score among the 17 countries in which TOEIC test taking is most popular.
As an ESL teacher in Japan, I should consider myself fortunate that people are willing to spend so much money on learning English. I wouldn’t have a job otherwise. That doesn’t mean to say I don’t take pride in teaching my students to speak the language. After all, that is what they are paying for, right? Wrong again, it would seem.
Time and time again, I hear of students frustrated about using the textbook too much in class, or having too much homework, while many simply forget to do their homework completely. Remember that in most ESL schools in Japan, students only take one class a week, so common sense would suggest that if they really wanted to learn English, they would take their lessons seriously and devote some of their free time to self-study.
Okay, fair enough, a lot of adults just study ESL as a hobby. Hey, it’s cool to tell their friends they study English, regardless of whether they are learning anything or not. But how about children? Surely the parents are paying these huge fees so that their sons and daughters can learn English. Well, that’s debatable.
You’ve got two kinds of schools in Japan, the English Conversation eikaiwa schools, and juku, or cram schools. Eikaiwa are where the foreigners like myself teach, while juku are heads down, study, study, study, Japanese teacher-led classes. Although English lessons at juku focus soley on reading and writing English, I always thought that eikaiwa were equally important for learning communication. Now, though, I’m changing my mind…
After disciplining one of my elementary school students for atrocious behaviour, his mother kicked up an enormous fuss.
“This isn’t a school!”, she said. “We don’t pay this money for you to discipline our children! They come here to have fun! If I wanted my child to learn English then I’d send him to juku!”
Well, that knocked me for six.
The next couple of days I walked around shell-shocked. If I’m not supposed to teach English, then what am I here for? Why did I bother studying to be a teacher? Do all the mothers feel this way? Why have I spent the last few years developing a curriculum to teach English, when I should have just pulled out a copy of 101 Great Games for Kids?
I’m starting to come to the conclusion that the boy’s mother is right, and I should not worry about teaching, and just have fun with the kids instead. I mean, from a business point of view, going head-to-head with the grammar and vocabulary-based English curriculum of juku is a no-win situation, as the Japanese will always consider juku as real education. Instead, I think I’ll just go in the opposite direction altogther and play game after game after game, perhaps throwing in a bit of English here and there just to appease the teacher in me. Who knows, maybe the kids will have so much fun, none of them will ever want to go to juku!
As things stand however, until high schools, universities and companies start requiring English communication skills over the ability to read a book and memorize 10,000 words, Japan will continue to produce the most educated yet worst English speakers in Asia.
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