Bizarre Teaching Moment #2: Play Ball!

~Salutations everyone, and happy June. Graduation time has rolled around again, so congratulations to all those who are leaving their respective educational institutions! Once you've suffered through "Pomp and Circumstance", you can laugh at me, who graduated last year yet somehow ended up in a school to pass along my *wisdom* and knowledge of movie quotes to those younger than me. If only you could be so lucky.

Today's bizarre teaching moment occurred about two weeks ago, with a student who is around five years old. At the time, he had been my student for less than a month, and I was having a devil of a time getting him to say anything in English. One day, I was dutifully taking him through a new phonics lesson for the letter 'U', which included two pictures of objects that start with 'U'. The boy mutely nodded when I showed him the 'umbrella' and said the word to him several times. Repressing a sigh, I began to pull out the next picture, a baseball umpire, when the student jumped off of the floor, pointed at the picture, and yelled out "Ump!".


I sat there in amazement as he shouted out baseball terms: Strike!, Home run!, Ball!, Out!, Safe!, Play Ball!, Foul Ball!, and even Chip!...all in perfect English. Recovering from my shock, I somehow cobbled together a baseball-type game using vocabulary cards as bases and a fake microphone as a bat, with a miniature soccer ball as a baseball. Incidentally, your Word of the Post is Yakyū (ya-cue), which is of course the Japanese word for baseball.

As if this wasn't strange enough, during the next class with this boy I set up a sort of soccer game using the soccer ball and vocabulary cards as the goal. While we were kicking the ball around the room, I kicked it into the wall, and the boy stopped and walked up to me. Shaking his head ruefully, he said (again, in perfect English), "Penalty Kick!", and promptly kicked the ball into the goal (future Japanese World Cup champion?).

So now, I use a sports-type game in every class with this particular student, and he's been speaking a lot more. In fact, if anything he's been babbling nonstop about Japanese baseball players (Ichiro Suzuki is his hero) and the upcoming World Cup tournament in Germany, which he is obsessed with.

Coming soon: more bizarre teaching moments, and more pictures from Okayama, where I am non-voluntarily going this weekend! Oh, the joys of mandatory follow-up training. I can hardly wait to present a model lesson designed for five-year-olds in front of my fellow teachers [/sarcasm] . Well, there's the signal--when you start to write in HTML, you know it's time for bed. ~Oyasumi!