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 [...]
September 1, 2007 – 7:38 pm
Initial Investment Payback in less than 13 months!
So I have now had my Smith’s school for 14 months after purchasing it for 2.7 million Yen in 2006. After starting with only 15 students I now have 49 but 7 are Man-to-Man (Private) which is like having 56 students. The clear earnings [...]
August 27, 2007 – 5:10 pm
In my lesson last night with a student who is working to improve her TOEFL score, we worked on a reading exercise which happened to be about the Canadian Government. Although it is probably well known to my Canadian fellow franchisees and I seem to remember that Canada is still a part of the [...]
August 26, 2007 – 1:46 am
Last Thursday, during the weekly “Night Out” event that I hold for my students at the local cafe, one of my students who had just come back from a trip to Salt Lake City and Indianapolis where she gave a presentation on statistics behind pharmaceutical trials in English to a group of American employees of [...]
August 22, 2007 – 5:17 pm
Saga Kita, a team from a nearly unknown school in the southern island of Kyushu, finished the perennial summer drama yesterday by hitting a grand slam home run in the 8th inning of the Japan Summer High School Baseball Tournament to take home their first championship trophy. This reversed a 1-4 deficit to finish [...]
August 19, 2007 – 5:17 am
I have a married couple who are Green level students that often come on Saturdays for a joint lesson. He is a cardiologist and she is a housewife. They are both very good speakers of English but I guess that he is a little better given his wide English medical vocabulary.
We covered one [...]
August 19, 2007 – 4:35 am
My last student on Saturday evening surprised me a bit when she thanked me for teaching her English and said that most of all, she was thankful to “get used to” talking with foreign people by learning English from me. She said that she often gets approached by foreigners who ask her directions on [...]
August 17, 2007 – 4:58 pm
He’s wearing a necktie when it’s 38 deg. C (100 deg. F) outside! You know already he is not working for any of the Smith’s English schools. Poor guy! I feel sorry for him not only because he has to wear that neck tie but also because he has not yet realized [...]
August 11, 2007 – 9:19 pm
Yesterday was my usual busy Saturday….7 straight lessons! In the middle of my busy teaching schedule, one of my man-to-man (private) students told me that she felt I must be a very rare English teacher in Japan since I have so much international business experience.
Having worked in Japan for a large Japanese electronics manufacturer for [...]
In my lesson last night with a young businessman, I was covering the first lesson about numbers. This student is a man-to-man student and is moving pretty fast. Especially, he seemed to have little trouble with numbers. The only funny thing was that he sometimes would say “47″ instead of “57″ etc. [...]
On Sunday July 29th, 2007 eight of us went to Universal Studios Japan to spend a day together riding rides and practicing English. It was a lot of fun! To be sure it was HOT and HUMID but not unlike what I remember Universal Studios Orlando being several years ago.
To view the page [...]
Yesterday evening I had a lesson with three red students. They were all ready for the “shooting the breeze” review of the intermediate level. So I went through the questions with them by giving examples and asking them to make questions to each other using each grammar point we were reviewing. I got [...]
This month started off a little slow. I only had one trial a few weeks ago but suddenly this week I got a new fax showing 6 trials this week. What a pleasant surprise! I was beginning to worry ….a little. But as has happened many times, there was nice surprise [...]
As is the case more often than not, Japanese company employees feel they cannot leave their company earlier to attend a personal activity. Drinking events and parties with colleagues are always acceptable reasons but individuals have a difficult time to just leave early for their own personal reason.
Today, one of my students who has [...]
I recently had a lesson with a 4th year university student who is planning to go to Canada to study for 6 months. He will study for 3 months for TOEIC test improvement and the last three months will be spent studying business in English. I am sure that he will have a [...]
This week I had four students attend the night out at SHUNJU, a local cafe where we meet every Thursday night. The “Night Out” is appreciated by many students as it gives them a chance to practice speaking English with myself and other students.
This week was quite good. I was impressed with how [...]
Last night one of my high level students came to class prepared. She was studying the vocabulary in a book which included 3800 words often used in the TOEIC. The words are ranked from 1 to 4 with the more difficult words as Rank 4. She prepared one of those small card [...]