Teach English in Bailong Zhen - Linfen Shi

I am a Brit, born and bred but I now live in Japan.
In the summer of 2017 I finished up my university degree and moved to Japan following my graduation. I got married to the Japanese man I had been dating for the previous 2 years and we began our marriage together in one of the rural areas of Yamaguchi Prefecture. 

We started to live together in Kudamatsu City, a small industrial town bordered by Shunan city to the west and Hikari city to the east. The area is well known for its numerous heavy industries factories that dot the coastline and its close proximity to Iwakuni Bridge and Hiroshima City. We have since moved across the country to Chiba Prefecture, but keep in contact with many friends and people that we had met during our time in Yamaguchi.
Some of these are students whom I taught English to during my last year in the prefecture.

 I began my teaching career by signing up to numerous English teaching websites. Of the many websites that I put my details on to, every single one of my students contacted me through hellosensei.com. 
 After receiving an email from a hopeful student who was interested in my lessons, we would agree to meet up for a free trial lesson where I would learn more about the student, what learning English would mean to them and how I could mould my lesson plans to meet their needs. The next lesson would be tailored to the individual student and we would build upon the lessons each week.

 During my year of teaching, I would say that I have had 3 very successful students; A 65 year old man, and 2 young siblings aged 4 and 7. My students were all taught individually one on one, which allowed me to cater for their age differences. 

The first student I received was the 65 year old man. An interesting gentleman, he had originally come from up north in the prefecture, but worked his whole life in the city I lived in. Now retired, he wanted to revisit learning English and speaking in English conversation so that he could possibly travel abroad with his wife in the future. The lessons were English conversation based with each lesson being different from the previous. 
 Originally I had planned to base my lesson on what we had spoken about the week before, but I often found that we slipped off course of the conversation and began to talk about something new. This made all of our lessons extremely interesting and I enjoyed learning about different aspects of Japanese culture, such as the history, the geology or of my students past.
 Every so often we would come across a word or phrase my student was unfamiliar with and we would go over the meaning and where it may have originated from. Whenever we found a verb he didn’t recognise, we would address it in each tense and give examples of how to use it within a sentence. The following week I would notice my student trying to use the word or phrase we had been over the week before. Sometimes, there was a mistake which had been made through misunderstanding and I would try to re-explain in a different way how he could make use of the words. Even so, he never seemed to be unenthusiastic about learning english with me.
 One of the things I learned from teaching the older man was that often my lessons with him were never long enough, as we would often trail off into deeper conversations about the subject and loose track of the time. To some teachers, this would mean making use of an alarm system at the end of class or demanding more pay for the class, but to me when we went over time because we were lost in conversation was good. It meant we had found something that my student could speak passionately about and I often enjoyed the rambles. For me, my lessons with my older student made me comfortable and I almost felt as if I was sharing life stories and learning about Japanese culture from someone that I could consider a respected grandfather.

 My two younger students, aged 4 and 7 years old, were very different from the 65 year old that I taught. Firstly, although young in age, they had both spent 2 years of their lives in the UK when their father had been sent on a project in the North of England. During those 2 years, the older sibling, had attended a private school and picked up a lot of English whilst she was there and the younger, having been very young was constantly picking up words just like a native English toddler would be in the UK. The knowledge that the 7 year old had of english shocked me so much when I met her, as she not only had a wide range of vocabulary but also an almost perfect northern accent. It was like meeting some British children with Japanese parents.
 I never met the father of the two children as he was often on business trips out of the country but their mother insisted that they keep up their English as she had high hopes that in the future they will return the the UK.
 During class, I would separate the lesson in two, 15 minutes for the 4 year old and 45 minutes for the 7 year old, if there was time at the end of class, I would ask the younger sibling to come back in so that we could all play a game together.
 In the beginning I would focus the first 15 minutes on reading for the 4 year old, and then as the months progressed I gradually added writing practice and some linguistic games to his lessons. 
The 45 minutes with the 7 year old would begin with me checking on her weekly diary and follow up with learning new phrases and words from her English Pictionary, during the last 10 minutes of our lesson, we would focus on her reading aloud one of her favourite book series; Rainbow Magic fairy Books.
 As the year went on, I decided to take a TEFL for young learners course to improve my lessons, and I learned how to use games in the classroom as well as how to structure the lesson more efficiently. Following my course completion, I started to add games, and produced some hand drawn Pokemon cards that we used in class for the children to learn English Pokemon names and how to play the game with foreign players. 
I found that the children loved the Pokemon cards, and towards the end of my time with them, we often had fun sessions where we would use the cards in different ways to practice english, for example: I would hold out a Pokemon image such as Pikachu and say “I have Pikachu. He is yellow. His power is 65”. The opposite player would then read out which Pokemon he or she has and then whomever had the stronger card got to keep both cards. 
Towards the last few weeks of my lessons with the children I found myself feeling quite sad, as I knew that my time was coming to an end with them and I hoped that they would continue to learn in the future and hoped all the best for them. The attachment that I had made with them felt very strong, and I knew that it had meant we had had a good time learning english together in the classroom.

 After I finished the lessons with my students in Yamaguchi I realised that I had discovered things about teaching that I never would had known if I hadn’t given it the chance. 
I learned to work with individuals and how they might struggle as well as how to keep students motivated in the classroom with games, activities and stories of my adventures. I also learned new things about myself, I had made many great friends and began to feel like part of the community in Yamaguchi prefecture.
 Moving away from my students was hard, as I was leaving those who I knew and the relationships I had formed behind, but now I had the motivation to look to the future and all the new interesting people that I am going to meet.