ballon

My interview for this job was in some hotel in Salt Lake City about this time last year. I was extremely nervous because lets face it....I did not have the credentials, at least on paper, to make a good teacher. I had never studied Japanese nor teaching, and I had left a job in construction to work at a ski resort only months before. The interview board were three men in total, two Japanese and one American. The American did most the talking....no one smiled, ever.

All in all, the interview went smoothly. They asked me why I failed statics, why I wanted to teach and do so in Japan. I answered as honestly and succinctly as I could.....bobbing my leg up and down the whole time. Then almost verbatim, this happened.

-"Luke, lets run a hypothetical by you."

="Yes sir."

-"Lets say your in the classroom and writing something on the chalk board. You turn around to continue your point and you see a hand raised in the back of the class. You call on this child and they tell you that you misspelled a word. How would you handle that situation?"

="Well sir, I'll admit I'm not the world's best speller. I would probably check out the word in question, reference it if I needed to and if the student is correct I'd give them a high five or just congratulate them. I think that my generation is more apt to make spelling errors since we have in essence grown up with the spell check option ever since we were in elementary school. As opposed to your generation that had the typewriter and making a typo on it would mean more than just an inconvenience."

At this point the fellow, shuffled through some papers and smirked to himself a bit.

-"Good answer Luke."

="Thank you. Why did you ask me that sir."

-"Well Luke, they noted on your application that you made well over 20 spelling and/or grammatical errors on your letter of interest."

And that's no exaggeration. I went back to check and saw my own errors...I think they totaled somewhere around 23. He also pointed out to me that I didn't Capitalize the word "English". Several times, I actual did and still do that on purpose most times. I understand the reason why it suppose to be done, but I'm considering this my chance to revolt against something.


The reason I tell this story now is because today I was allowed to have an entire period of teaching the English. It was left to my discretion to warp their young minds as however I see fit. It was a little nerve racking figuring out what to do and how to do it, but I loved it. Everything I planned went off without a hitch. We had small conversations, repeated new dialogue, played a game to practice vocabulary...it was refreshing to say the least. Ms. Abe, the permanent 1st grade English teacher, said to me after that even an extremely shy student that never says or does anything got really into the game.

Towards the end, with about two minutes to kill, and me having nothing left but to practice the vocab again, Ms. Abe brought to my attention that one of the students saw a mistake in my writing on the board. The girl was super shy, but I pleaded her to come and show me where my mistake was and she did.

ballon

she added the extra "o" i missed

I gave her a high five....and a sticker of a monkey.