January 3, 2008 – 5:21 am
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I want to point out some obstacles that Japanese students of English face. I could start with the fact that English pronunciation is hundreds of times more difficult than Japanese or the fact that Japanese has no articles or is not a prepositional language like English or [...]
December 30, 2007 – 9:30 pm
English in Japan. Simply put, it is everywhere and nowhere at various levels of correctness and authenticity. It is being used by some Japanese on a regular basis to communicate with foreigners they meet or correspond with through their business or study. It, or some semblance of it, is found on thousands [...]
December 30, 2007 – 6:33 am
Why become a Teacher-Owner of your own English Conversation School in Japan at this moment? Because the largest corporate English conversation school in Japan, which had 60% of the market share went out of business three months ago after a 21-year build-up, and left hundreds of thousands of its students with little to show for [...]
December 28, 2007 – 5:37 am
We teacher-owners of Smith’s School of English are very lucky to be able to enjoy not only the rewards of owning and operating our own schools but also to make a difference in the lives of our students and to really be able to help them to realize their full potential. Unike the teachers at [...]
December 27, 2007 – 5:57 am
I really enjoyed reading Adrian’s posts too. It is great to see that someone has been in this business as a Smith’s owner for over 7 years and still really enjoys it and has helped his students to get great results on the EIKEN and TOEIC. Makes me still feel like an infant with only [...]
December 24, 2007 – 9:21 am
Well, another great benefit of Smith’s School is the long holidays that we have to rest and spend time with family and friends and travel if we choose. The Christmas-New Year’s Holiday spans 15 days this year (from Dec. 23rd to Jan. 6th). It’s been only two days so far and I already [...]
December 22, 2007 – 11:32 pm
I really enjoyed reading this one written by Craig, the owner of the Ohtsu School. It expresses exactly what we must do to succeed. Become a part of the local merchant family and show the brand. Get to know the people doing business in the vicinity of your school and let them [...]
December 22, 2007 – 10:57 pm
Well, I am planning to have a New Year’s Party again this year. This time I will rent out the cafe below my school for 2-3 hours. I often eat at the cafe during the year and the owner is always very kind and hospitable. It is a family owned restaurant called Cafe DECO and [...]
December 16, 2007 – 5:50 am
The other day I had a late lesson with three students. They were all working for companies. One is a company director, one is a new employee for a major electronics and one works for a top-rated sports shoe manufacturer. We did a phrase lesson and covered some new vocabulary. [...]
December 16, 2007 – 5:24 am
Recently I noticed that more and more trial students are coming to the school with copies of my web pages. Copies of the main page and the pages for the events are usually included. I always mention that I noticed they had looked at my site. They always say, “Yes, it looks [...]
December 7, 2007 – 4:53 pm
For those considering to work for a corporate school, you might want to take a look at one such teacher’s plight on a popular web video upload site. Although the story shown there is exaggerated a bit and was made mostly for the purpose of entertainment, it is still all too real for some [...]
December 5, 2007 – 4:53 pm
Well I’ve almost finished my first year and a half as an English school owner-teacher in Japan. Although there were some tough times, overall it has been quite fun and rewarding. I’ve had more fun this past year than I’d had in the five years prior! Great students, fun events, great [...]
December 2, 2007 – 3:21 am
I have often remembered my students birthdays and gotten them a piece of cake from one of the fine bakeries in the neighborhood of the school. As Okamoto is well know for great bakeries, this is always fun and I have never ever gotten cake that the students do not enjoy. But this [...]
November 23, 2007 – 4:52 pm
One of my man-to-man students is a premed student. In his English class at his university he was required to write his opinion on some difficult topics related to medical ethics. His chosen topic was “End of Life Issues”. He came to class with his draft and we checked it together and [...]
November 21, 2007 – 6:46 pm
The staff at the head office is great! They have helped me many times and just the other day one of my students told me that the young women who answer the phone to book their lessons etc. are always very kind and helpful. She was very sincere when she said this. [...]
November 21, 2007 – 4:17 pm
With the recent failure of the largest corporate English school in Japan, I have come to wonder, shall I say “hope” that those 400,000+ students will take a hard look at how they were treated by this corporate school and decide to find a monthly tuition school like Smith’s so as not to be burned [...]
November 20, 2007 – 2:54 pm
Well that’s a good question. First, I like being able to set my own schedule. Second, I have the personal satisfaction of knowing that I am giving a good lesson since the Smith’s curriculum is solid and was developed considering the needs of Japanese students but is open-ended enough to be expanded to meet the [...]
November 17, 2007 – 7:01 pm
I have a student whose family lived in Vancouver for 2 years. She studied at a private kindergarten and elementary school for two years. She is reading at about 3rd grade level. However, she needs to practice writing, otherwise she will not be able to write at her level. She is [...]
November 14, 2007 – 8:40 pm
Last week and this week on Wednesday, I had fun lessons with one of my Orange students. She is fortunate to have a lesson alone quite often. Last week I taught the lesson “Adjectives 1″ and under “Opinion” I wrote up “useful” and “useless” and used the remote control for the CD player [...]
November 7, 2007 – 5:17 pm
Regarding the purchase of a large English language school by another corporation, it is high time for Japanese foreign language students to understand the basics of the business of language education. First you have a teacher in a classroom or over the net teaching perhaps 2 to 6 students. The basis of [...]
October 23, 2007 – 7:53 pm
Don’t you just love this fall weather? The temperature during the day is just right. And in the evening it is not yet very cool so the evenings are nice too.
It makes me remember all those years that I worked from dawn to dusk and hardly even saw the daylight. Being a [...]
October 15, 2007 – 12:13 am
Good morning! How are you?
You probably think it must get frustrating to say this over and over a thousand times while trying to establish eye contact and smile at those prospective students when I pass out flyers. I would be seriously remiss if I were to say there is never any frustration, but there are [...]
October 7, 2007 – 10:35 pm
We are planning to have a small Halloween Party for some Smith’s Okamoto students on Saturday Oct. 27th at a local restaurant. I have already got about 12 people who are saying that they will attend. I think it will top out between 15 and 20 attendees. The restaurant only holds 26. [...]
September 30, 2007 – 5:24 am
First, congratulations to Sue Six on her first trial.
Today I got two emails from my previous students. One who is studying for six months in Canada and one who is now in Sydney for about the same time. They are both doing well, making friends and getting use to using English everyday for [...]
September 23, 2007 – 8:33 pm
So, what does it take to be the owner of your own successful school? Well, it doesn’t take too much money but it does take willpower. Now, not everyone has the willpower that he/she thinks he/she does. I asked myself “Do you want to enjoy teaching English? Do you want to [...]
September 19, 2007 – 5:11 pm
Last night I tried out my new routine on two red students. I had written this routine back in May after returning from my trip to Hawaii where I visited my son and his family. I tried this one time before and discovered it was too long and difficult for most students to complete. I [...]
September 16, 2007 – 5:31 pm
On Saturday a mother and her daughter stopped by to check on a trial. I was near the end of a lesson but did not think that I could do a trial in less than 15 minutes, so I called the staff and gave the mother the phone to set up a trial time [...]
September 12, 2007 – 4:48 pm
Yesterday I had a really nice lesson with an orange student. We covered the item “Past II” for past continuous in which we cover the bank robbery and what the students were doing in the morning and afternoon. As expected, she did not know what “naughty” meant. I explained that it [...]
September 10, 2007 – 5:08 pm
Over the past few months the real estate office on the first floor below my school has been converted into a crepe shop. ”L’air du Temps” is the name which seems to mean “The Air of Time” in French. Such off-the-wall names in French seem to be popular these days as we already had a cake [...]
September 3, 2007 – 5:03 pm
Of course I am sure that a human being can get used to living anywhere, but it really is easy to get used to living in Japan. Of course it helps a lot to learn the language and I highly recommend working to do that before you come and after you arrive. But [...]