Whose Birthday is it Today?

As an English teacher in Japan, starting lessons with a series of small talk questions is an essential part of the daily routine. Traditionally, teachers kick off their classes by asking:

- What day is it today?

- What’s the date?

- How is the weather?

- What time is it now?

In my personal teaching journey, I decided to spice things up a little by adding a question of my own: "Whose birthday is it today?" Whenever there's a birthday, I lead the students in singing the "Happy Birthday!" song. After trying this once, I discovered that the students enjoyed it immensely, and so I've continued incorporating it into my lessons ever since.

But why does this simple question matter? Well, it's a fantastic way to show my students that I genuinely care about them beyond the English language curriculum. There have even been instances when students who didn't have a lesson with me that day would excitedly approach me in the hallway just to share that it was their birthday.

Of course, as with any group of teenagers, some students attempt to pull a fast one, claiming it's someone's birthday when it's not. The impromptu "birthday celebrant" often looks surprised and exclaims, "No, no!" This always results in a good laugh. To stay one step ahead, I made it my mission to memorize the birthdays of every student I teach (typically three (3) year groups, each with four arms and about 30-40 students per class; you do the math 😏). So, when they try to catch me off guard, I confidently reveal the correct birthday like a boss. The look of awe on their faces is truly priceless.

This school year, I decided to take things up a notch by memorizing the students' zodiac signs as well. Instead of simply confirming or denying a student's birthday, I'd say something like, "No, it's not Maru's birthday - he's a Libra, right?" Most of the time, the Japanese English teacher (JTE) would translate the zodiac sign into Japanese, and the student(s) would nod in amazement.

By incorporating this personal touch into my lessons, I've managed to strengthen the emotional connections with my students. These seemingly small gestures can make a significant impact on the learning environment, fostering trust and camaraderie between teacher and student. In the long run, these connections can lead to better engagement, motivation, and overall interest in the language (or whatever subject) you are trying to teach them. 

So, ALTs and English teachers in Japan, why not give it a try? The next time you ask do the 4 questions thing, don't be afraid to ask, "Whose birthday is it today?"

Thanks for stopping by, see you next post!

 

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It’s Graduation Day!

We had our graduation ceremony today and so many befitting adjectives come to mind: solemn, precision and uniformity, orderly and beautiful, traditional, and, I wouldn’t be wrong if I added spiritual to the list. It was memorable and touching, so much so that I got the inspiration to write after such a long time LOL! I had a hard time holding back the tears from the very minute that the procession of graduating students marched in, led by their form tutors. The dam burst eventually when the 3C form tutor got on the podium and tearily made a roll call of her students for the last time 🙈. 

There was nothing impromptu about the beautiful ceremony that I witnessed today. It was all well planned and smoothly executed. Graduating students, the third-year teachers and planning committee prepared extensively, rehearsing the procession vigorously and rigorously, leaving no room for mistakes. Proper Samurai style. I love it! In fact, the schedule and program schedule were printed days before so everyone knew what to expect. It started at 9 a.m. on the dot, and ended at 10. This is worthy of mention and notable for me, coming from a culture of “African Time” where we give room to people who may be running late while spending some extra time putting unnecessary last-minute adjustments on a whim🥴. 

During the ceremony, I observed several aspects and cultural symbols and mannerisms which I believe are distinctly Japanese. I mean, Japan never ceases to amaze me especially with the way that they have held on to tradition and their refusal to bow to western/outside influences in certain key areas. Of course, there are many western elements that they embraced to keep up with the rest of the global society, but they have succeeded in giving those things some kind of Japanese flavour.

Ambience is everything. There were flowers- real and decorative- all around the school. The paper ones were made out of cardboards and crafted like Sakura which is the National flower of Japan. Most of the colourful decorations were hand-made by junior students (first and second grade), supervised and assisted by teachers. The stage of the gym where the ceremony took place was the most fascinating for me. Colourful and beautiful, it had so many decorations, the flag of Japan and the school flag as the backdrop, and I noticed that everyone who had something to do on stage bowed in obeisance to the flags before they climbed up. And oh, 校長先生 (principal) looked so regal in his Kimono, I had to ask for a picture 😄. 

The solemnity of the ceremony bounced up and down the back of many bows. The moving and eloquent speeches by the principal, the outgoing and incumbent students’ representative were all met with polite, straight-backed formal bows. Not the cheering and clapping of hands that I am used to. We only clapped thrice- as the graduating students marched in and filed out, and after the reception when they were leaving school with their parents. 

Two years working as a 4 Skills Support teacher to support the English learning journey of the graduating students and I am so going to miss them. Wishing them good luck and best wishes for the future. 卒業おめでとうございます。

Thanks for stopping by. See you next post!

 

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What’s Love Got To Do With It? 🤑

 

 

If you’re a foreign language teacher of teenage students and you’re having trouble getting them to speak and use the language, then you need to bring love into the equation! I mean, like  literally. Center your activities around relationships and love and watch your students go off. You probably already knew this. 

 

The way that the second graders hollered today when the JTE introduced the topic: “Which is more important, money or love? Why?” to practice comparative forms. I knew the lesson was about to take a delightful turn and I was not disappointed. Students took a minute to think about their answers and then had a mingle session- boys chatting to boys and girls to girls, as it usually is in Japanese classrooms. Only the brave would dare to have a chat with the opposite sex during mingling activities. 

 

I had the time of my life as I went round monitoring and listening to their hilarious responses. Usually, I would be interrupting students using the mingling activity time to chat away in Japanese and encouraging them to use English but not today; they were totally on task and each student understood what the other said perfectly. The girls, ha! They squealed and pelted the air with delightsome giggles. The motivation in the boys’ group was at an all time high- nods of agreement and boisterous laughter. 

 

And then came the whole class feedback session to ask some students to share their answers. More girls than boys thought money was more important than love while a lot more boys thought love was more important. One girl’s reason for choosing money was because she knows what money can buy but what can love buy? Talk about a girl who knows what she wants! One of the boys chose money because “girls often go to the money.” What is the world turning into, you say? LOL! A Mama’s boy spoke up and chose love because “love is strong and my mother’s love is strong.” That got us incurable romantics awwing and clapping. Then, this cheeky boy said, “Money is more important because I don’t make love.” I wondered if that meant what I thought it did and the gasps and knowing looks and giggles on the faces of the others told me exactly what I needed to know. Just before the chime went off, the last boy to answer said, “Money is more important than love because money is power!” He said it with so much conviction, leaving us all in fits of laughter right into the closing greeting. Needless to say, the lesson was fun and the aims were achieved. 

 

So, “Which is more important, money or love? Why?” Leave your answer in the comment section. 

 

Thanks for stopping by, see you next post!

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From Active Teaching to Active Observation

 When I transited from being an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) to a 4Skills Support teacher in 2020, I moved from active teaching to actively supporting the Japanese teachers of English (JTE), as well as observing the happenings  in the English language classroom and Japanese educational system generally. Though I miss having to plan lessons and not being in front of class as often as I used to, my role has afforded me the chance to notice a lot more things than I would have if I had my head buried in lesson planning and stuff. And believe me when I say, I have seen thingssss… LOL. Good stuff really and, more than ever, I am super impressed with the Japanese education. So, if you are curious about Japan’s world-famous educational system, you’re in luck because going forwards, I’ll be sharing the juicy stuff, from my POV of course. 

 

Also, my domain name changed, did you notice? I had issues with the former one and now it’s teacher-lola.com and no longer teacherlola.com. Just a tiny dash yeah, but it’s like starting from scratch to drive traffic to my blog and I’ll still need to do some tweaking to make it look good and more functional. 

Well, let me shamelessly say that the point of this boring post is to invite you to bookmark my blog if you haven’t already, and be on the lookout so that you catch new posts hot off the press. Also, comments and engagements with posts will go a long way. 

Phew, feels so good to be back typing and putting my thoughts back up on this space. And if you read up to this point, I thank you. Your support is highly appreciated.

 

Thanks for stopping by, see you next post!

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MaskAdaisical

School’s out for summer! Phew. It was a tough one but I’m so glad we made it to the end of the term, the crazy challenges notwithstanding. 

COVID-19 changed the dynamics of teaching and learning as we know it. For example, there weren't opportunities for team building/ group tasks and students had to sit a few meters apart to maintain social distancing. Never mind that students broke the social distancing rule from time to time. Of course, we also had to wear masks 24/7 to prevent the spread of the virus. I found that teaching EFL with a mask over your mouth is nothing short of annoying and frustrating. Needless to say that modeling proper pronunciation was difficult to achieve. 

Owing to the fact that I started working at this school at the time when the pandemic was beginning to gain momentum, I have no idea what my students look like without masks. Towards the end of the term, students were beginning to get antsy and “maskadaisical” and occasionally they would slip down their masks for a breath of fresh air and it was always a pleasant surprise! They looked nothing like I’d imagined. It was almost as if their masks came with “open for a surprise” labels.

One of the biggest moments for me this term was when I had the opportunity to attend a mini-sporting event between two arms of the first grade and all participants had their masks off. I didn’t know who was who and it was exciting to identify them by distinct features like their height, hairstyle and attitude. They had a good laugh every time I gasped and called out “——- is that you!” I was so overwhelmed with happiness that I wept, literally! 

This experience helped me appreciate the seemingly little things that we take for granted- braces, freckles, dimples and crooked dentition! I really hope that a vaccine is discovered soon. We can never go back to “normal”- surely not, but I hope that the lessons of hygiene, compassion and consideration for others and their personal space, among others, remain with us after this is all over.

As schools are just being re-opened in some parts of the world, I wish all the teachers who are just about to start work a successful school term as well. As far as this pandemic is concerned, we can never be too careful thus hand washing and sanitizing are very important, and also keep the masks on by all means. 

Thanks for stopping by, see you next post. 

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What Does "a" Mean?

Anticipating problems that may arise and proffering solutions to them was one of the highlights of my CELTA training. While planning your lesson, for each stage you need to predict and note down how you would respond to learner needs. Obviously, this is to give you an edge and keep you prepared and it’s always a good feeling if you have predicted something rightly.

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A For Self-Awareness

Today, after my lesson with Year 2-2 (the second arm of the Second grade), the JTE commended me for what I’d always considered a flaw in my teaching skills. 

Lesson planning is one aspect of teaching I enjoy so much. Putting together the slides and activities tailored to each of my students' needs gives me so much joy.  My greatest lessons have been birthed at this stage however, sometimes I fall below standard due to one reason or the other- mostly the lack of time, and it shows greatly. Often, the first class I go in to teach are the scapegoats who take the fall. The poor students in Year 2-1 were the victims this week. 

So here’s the backstory. While planning the grammar lesson on the subordinate conjunction “If”, I thought the activity in the ready-made lesson plans wouldn’t cut it for my students but I also had a hard time coming up with a better one. I finally settled for some kind of practice game where I spilt 10 sentences into two colour-coded, blue and orange halves.

The blue and orange made a pair and the students had to work in groups of five where each group receives a bundle of 20 strips which the selected group leader shuffles and gives each student two blue and two orange strips each. The first player puts a blue or an orange strip on the table reads the sentence/phrase out loud while the other students check to see if they have the pair to complete the sentence. Whoever had the other half read out the complete sentence and gets to keep both strips. The student with the most strips wins. The demonstration stage went ok but I didn’t anticipate the problem and possibility of one student having the two halves that make a pair, one student’s four strips were all matching pairs! If you know Japanese students, they follow instructions to the letter, so they didn’t see this coming since it didn’t come up during the demonstration. From that point onward, the activity didn’t make sense any more and the Year 2-1 students got very confused. I tried to salvage the situation by stopping the activity to point out that some students could have the complete pair, but it didn’t help much. Needless to say that the aim of the activity was defeated.

The Year 2-2 lesson was the very next period and I had only 10 minutes in between to muster all my creative juices to fix the mess.  I had a last-minute idea which I hoped would work. So, instead of making them play a modified card game of some sort, I had them work in groups to arrange the strips in the right pairs and informed them that the first group to finish wins. As I monitored, I noticed that some groups found the task a bit challenging and I told them to send spies to see how the other groups were doing. At the end of the activity, we had a feedback session to check answers and I collected all the blue cards and had them turn the orange ones over. They then had to randomly pick one orange card and complete the sentence using their own ideas. This wasn’t in my lesson plan but it worked really well as a production activity.  

As we walked out of the class after the lesson, the JTE who is a rookie teacher was in awe, told me he admired the way I completely switched the lesson around. I smiled and took the compliment graciously but I told him that in reality, I’m not usually proud of these moments because it shows my lack of detailed planning and more so, I feel bad for the students who did not get the best because I’m really not sure if I’ll have a chance to re-teach. I agreed with him though that it would take some experience and skill to be able to pull that off. 

We ended up talking about three types of teachers- the self-aware and reflective one, the one who can’t recognise a failed lesson plan even if it smacks them in the face, the one who is dogged and determined to stick to the lesson plan even when it’s obvious that it’s not working. Which one are you?

Thanks for stopping by! See you next post. 

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Happy Tears In The Classroom

Last week, I was reminded again of how much of a cry-baby I am when responding to my students’ achievements in the classroom. I am so sure that every good teacher has stories to share about precious moments like this.

So, there is no special needs class in the other school where I teach and learners with learning needs are mainstreamed with the other students and usually, these special students of mine just basically do their own thing and sometimes they sleep through the lesson. I've toyed with the idea of creating extra or different tasks for special students but the JTEs didn’t really buy the idea. In fact, one JTE specifically told me that she’ll “take care of the student” herself. I guess this might be because Japan is a group-oriented society and differentiating by task may make the student feel totally different and isolated, disability irrespective. One of the things I don't like about being an ALT is not having total control to make decisions about my students' welfare and learning, as I always have to get an OK from the JTE. The struggle I go through when I’m teaching in a class with students like this is real. I feel bad for them and I’ve always wondered what I could do to help them learn and I keep trying different ways in the hope that I'll be able to reach them somehow.

A miracle happened last week. One boy who usually sits and stares into space and does nothing even after I've asked the girl beside him to work with him and help him, surprised me and the JTE. 

So, in that class, the students learned how to use the target sentence “There is…/There are…” Students got into groups of five after I modelled the game and they started playing a board game to practise using the target language. As I went round monitoring, the JTE called my attention to the table of my boy whom I’ve been worried about. My heart did a flip as I saw him throw the dice and make a very correct sentence using the target language. In the JTE’s words “this is the first time I’ve seen his smile since I started working in this school” of course at this point I couldn’t hold back the tears and I had to quickly step out into the hallway to comport myself. At the end of the activity, as we took a roll call of champions, guess who won one round of the games in his group? Yup! My boy.

Like I told the JTE, there’ll definitely be more of board games in that class because we’ll be foolish not to use this newly found key as often as possible and hopefully, we’ll find out other ways to help him learn and participate in class.

In other news, school’s out! The summer holidays officially begin today. It’s been one great ride of adventures, fun, bonding with my students, learning, unlearning and relearning. I'll be doing a lot of reading and research on more ways to reach out to special needs students in regular classes. I am new to teaching SEN so please I'll appreciate ideas and links in the comment. I would like to appreciate you for coming on this ride with me so far. Thank you for every time that you took time out to read my posts. Thank you for every time you read and left me a note, I really appreciate that. 
I might also have some kind of online training for Nigerian teachers coming soon I’ll keep you guys posted, please watch this space.

Thank you so much for stopping by, see you next post!

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Backing Up Your Backup Plan

How’s it going? Hope everyone is having a great school-week so far. It’s almost Friday and I  can’t wait! Gosh, I am so super teacher-tired!

This week has gone well really and there’s nothing much to report except that my laptop almost did the unthinkable on Tuesday morning, sending me into a state of panic because I had no back-up plan!

In fairness to my faithful, soon-to-be 5 years old Samsung laptop, it has been showing signs of tiredness but I’ve been coaxing and urging it to take one more step because I’m not ready for a new one yet. But on Tuesday morning when I got to school and tried to turn it on in preparation for my four back to back lessons which I had from first till 4th period, it just didn’t come on. Instead, I got an error message that the system was “scanning and repairing Drive C” and this was about 25 minutes before the start of class. After what seemed like forever, it finally rebooted just about 5 minutes before class time. Phew!

At that moment, I was reminded of the importance of having a plan B. I mean, technology is great and often 99.999% reliable but you never can tell when the 0.0001% error will show up. It goes without saying that you should always have a backup plan as a teacher.

To be honest with you, I haven’t learned my lesson yet. I still haven’t created back-ups since Tuesday because the laptop has been working perfectly after that episode LOL but maybe next week I will! So, my plan is to upload my slides and materials for each week on Google drive so I can access them from anywhere if something goes wrong. I could also back up my back-up plan by printing out hard copies of slides and materials but that would mean having a lot of paper to throw away after a while. Anyways we’ll see.

Do you use technology in your classroom? If you do, how do you back up your plans for the times when technology acts up?   

This has got to be the most boring post ever but I’m glad you made it up to this point.

Thanks for stopping by, see you next post!

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What Dimples and Teaching Have In Common

One of my students has dimples. Deep ones that sink into his cheeks when he smiles. I didn’t even know that he knew how to smile until today. He gave me a sweet smile that lit up his cute face. Made me really happy 

Dimpled-cheek Reo sits at the end of the first row, sulking and never willing to participate in any activity no matter how hard I or the JTE tried.

But today, at lunchtime I sat with his lunch group and we got talking. I hadn’t yet learned the names of the students in this group so I asked. I heard Reo clearly but the name of the boy next to him got lost in the lunchtime music blaring through the speaker. The poor kid repeated his name but I still didn’t get it, because Japanese names... so Reo helped out by saying “Captain Tsubaya” in a louder voice. I got the joke, widened my eyes in surprise, said “oh wow a Captain” and saluted the Captain. That made Reo smile. The rest of the lunch time conversation went really well with Reo participating actively.

Thinking about this episode, I’m still not clear about why Reo is so uncooperative in English class, I’m usually as silly, cracking “dry jokes” that make the students go “aaah Nigerian joke “  I have a hunch that he doesn’t like being at the back, sitting at the end of the row. For lunchtime, their tables were arranged vertically so that if I looked from my right he was first, still at the edge of the row but definitely not the last. But I’m not making conclusions yet, next week I’ll see if this “new relationship” transcends into the English lesson otherwise, I’ll have to dig deeper.

I’ve seen those dimples today and I intend to keep seeing them! If you have any tips on how to make this magic happen again and again please share. Also, this post will be filed under the “Heart-warming stories from the classroom” label and I’d like to start collecting sweet memories from classrooms all over the world under this tag. If you’d like to contribute please send an email to 1teacher2anoda@gmail.com. Your story will be published and you’ll be duly credited.

Thanks for stopping by, I hope that your day is made cheerful by sweet, dimpled smiles. See you next post!

Picture credit: found on google photos, traced to @mr.alani on Instagram. 

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