Please do it at home. Like Tower English!

Wow. Has it really been since August that I've posted anything here? Sorry folks, if any of you are still reading this.

Well, I've been doing my bit for Queen and country, running the Teganuma Eco Marathon at a snail's pace and been a bit busy with other stuff. While I've been using the internet to - how you say - goof off? I've had a brainwave and thought, why not use my newly acquired knowledge of cheap digital cameras and free uploads to YouTube and do something worthwhile-ish for the business (You know, Tower English? The best darn tootin' English conversation school in Kounoyama no less).

Here's my latest wheeze. I do look a bit pasty and I was a bit subdued as it was after midnight when I filmed myself, but I'm hoping I'm onto something with 3-minute English lessons once a week as a way of promoting the school on its blog (over there on the right) and having fun making them. Whaddaya think?

Here's what's been taking up all my time recently...

(Oh, best if you click on one of the buttons under the video to make it full screen!)

Learning between the lines

You'd be surprised what you can learn as an English teacher. When teaching, especially one-to-one (or man-tsu-man as it is called in Japanese, even when your student is a woman) your role becomes less of a lecturer bestowing wisdom from on high, and more of a co-conspirator, a sort of cross-between a catholic priest and psychiatrist, there to offer advice (and correct verb endings) in exchange for a glimpse into another life. Here's just a sample of what I have learnt between the syntax:

• It is considered rude for women to wear strong perfume while at a sushi restaurant, as others will be unable to appreciate the taste of their food.
• Most kids want a Nintendo DS (cheap portable computer game with extortionately expensive software) for Christmas.
• While others dream of becoming doctors or lawyers, one bright boy said he wants to be a "freeter" when he grows up (a temp worker, not tied to one company for life).
• Japanese are apathetic or cynical about politics because "the bureaucrats run everything anyway".  

After the party

Emma struggles to stay awake.

We're all recovering from the party yesterday with 115 of our closest friends of Tower-English. Not only were there speeches from some of our students - 32 children and five adults braved public scrutiny 

of their English - but we also had two former students and two native speakers offering their two-pence too. I was so busy, I didn't take a single picture or video, which was a grave PR error on my part, but in my defence, I was too busy doing my job to film me doing my job. However, Tower English's unofficial photographer May Arai was on hand to snap away, so we're looking forward to what she has to offer. Click here to see the official report on our sister blog, Tower Talk...

 

One year of independence

Folks, today is an auspicious day indeed. Not only has the visit counter hit 1776 - the year of America's foundation - and the US Vice Presidential candidates are ready to rumble in a few hours, but it is also another anniversary. It was one year ago today that Tower English opened its doors to three mothers and their toddlers for our first playgroup. We had a grand total of three students signed up for weekly lessons and we had only about as much money in the bank as the Lehman Brothers do now, but how the investment bank must be looking enviously at our balance sheet now. It's often said that going into business on your own is risky, but as the current financial crisis confirms, doing the same old thing is even riskier. Anyway, we've been lucky and are holding a party on Sunday at the local community centre to give thanks with over 100 guests connected to our school. We'll definitely be showing up, unlike a certain guest on Letterman, America's pre-eminent talk show:

Don't mess with the kappa

What's the connection between journalists, karaoke box waitresses and English teachers? None of them can hold a tune? All of them are alcoholics? No, silly. They all work anti-social hours. Since my students have to earn a living or attend primary school, I have to be available when they are. It makes for a natural rhythm to my day: Mornings are for teaching little kids; afternoons for housewives and retired folk; late afternoons for schoolkids; and evenings for salarymen (and women) popping by at 9pm to top up their English before bedtime. But don't fret, there's often the odd hour free between lessons despite being on call from 9am to 10pm weekdays and Saturdays too. Anyway, on one such moment of freedom, while riding my bike round Teganuma (that's the local lake, not an Aztec god) I saw a sign featuring the kappa water sprite, whose festival we attended the other day. On this sign, he is helpfully warning children not to throw rubbish in the lake. He looks cute here, but you wouldn't like him when he's angry.

First Kounoyama... then the world!

Spot of tea, old chap?

We started back at work today, but with one small difference. We're no longer just an English school, oh no, we are now tea merchants too. Well, sort of. Our first friends in Abiko, a Japanese-Sri Lankan family, have received a licence to import tea and we said we'd be happy to display their wares and try to find some customers for them. It's all part of the plan. Sort of. Margaret asked me what my five-year plan was the other day, and I said we haven't really got one. If you had asked me five years ago what I would be doing now, I couldn't have predicted how my life has changed. But it got me thinking. I don't know about five years, but here's my ideal result:

• We are a well-respected English language school.
• We have our own premises with a lively tea and coffee shop on the ground floor.
• We operate a thriving English language bookshop from the basement.
• We have a small publishing operation in the attic, producing original teaching material for profit and the odd novel or two for kicks, and for sale in our bookshop.

In short, I'd love to see us develop into a cultural centre for English. It's possible, after all, the British Empire started with just a liking for tea...

A day in the life of Tower English

• 7am Alarm goes off. Katherine is first out of the futon (the kids have snuggled between mum and dad sometime in the night).
• 7:15am Adults get up. Yoshie starts breakfast (toast for her, cereal for Dad and Katherine, rice bowl for Emma) Dad puts away kids' and parents' futons and then takes out today's permitted rubbish to the collection point on the corner (today it's burnable rubbish and garden waste). Find six perfectly good plastic plant pots that someone has thown out and liberate them from the rubbish, stashing them in our garage for future use. 
• 7:50am Two neighbourhood kids call for Katherine, they walk off together for school.
• 8am Yoshie walks to Katherine's school to take her turn reading a book to one of the four first-year classes. Dad finishes breakfast tries to read the Japan Times while battling with Emma to get her to finish her food/brush her teeth/go to the toilet/wash her hands/pick up her toys/read her book/stop colouring in her dolly's face with the whiteboard markers
• 8:30am Yoshie back from reading duties, we begin the great cleanup ready for playgroup - washing down the entrance hall and outside steps with salt water, vacuuming downstairs, mopping the floor and laying the ABC plastic mats through the living room, putting out wooden toys, guest book, money tin and name stickers and setting up the props we will need for the playgroup.
• 9:50am First of eight mothers arrives for the playgroup. Crank up the volume with Incy Wincy spider CD.
• 11:30am Playgroup finishes. Fishmonger arrives shortly after. Mother-in-law Michiko buys week's fish with proceeds from today's playgroup.
• 12pm Lunch. Today it's sandwiches and wheat snacks suspiciously like hula hoops, though Michiko can't face all the bread and has rice and seaweed instead. Emma wins how-many-hula-hoops-can-you-put-on-your-fingers competition with her dad.
• 1-1:50pm First class with K-san, a retired lady who is keeping her English lessons a secret from her daughter until she is better at speaking (her idea, not mine).
• 2-2:50pm Second class with K-san.
• 3-3:50pm Have business-English class with lady who is starting her new job at an English-speaking company in Tokyo on Monday. She will be fine, but just needs her confidence boosting. Meanwhile, Katherine has returned from school and Yoshie and the girls have cycled off to Dance Studio Nagaoka for Katherine's ballroom class (she's pretty good at the tango now.) 
• 4:30-5:30pm Give a level-check and free trial lesson to two retired ladies. Get them waving Hello and Goodbye cards stuck to chopsticks to the Beatles song of the same name, before training them to introduce themselves at a party. Yoshie explains what has just happened in Japanese and they sign up for lessons from July.
• 5:35pm Neighbour pops by with June's tuition fee for her son, and box of chocolate biscuits for being late paying.  
•  6-7.30pm I make sure yellow chain has been replaced across entrance to car parking spaces down the road that we've started renting for students. Pop in the shower with Katherine and Emma while Yoshie and her mum get dinner ready.  Today it's seashell soup, fried pork and vegetables in soy sauce, steamed rice and the chocolate biscuits which turn out to be individually wrapped fudge brownie cakes. Put the futons out for kids and their folks.
• 8-8.50pm Teach a very nice lady who lived in London  for a year. Teach new word "stoical" and talk about difficult vocab in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which she has just finished reading. Try to explain "His face was drawn, but the curtain was real." Meanwhile, Yoshie puts the girls to bed.
• 9-9.50pm Teach a salaryman a lesson on directions (go straight ahead/ the massage parlour is on the left next to the bank. Just joking, it is of course on the right). Meanwhile, Yoshie plans two kids' lessons for tomorrow and laminates anything she can get her hands on.
• 10pm I have a can of beer/update our accounts, think about two adults' lessons for tomorrow/look over Yoshie's plans, talk about ideas for the school (new lesson-in-progress sign for gate, shifting some class times) and do a spot of blogging. Yoshie sets up kids' class props. We're doing a treasure hunt tomorrow.
• 1am freetime!
• 1.10am bedtime.

Best things in life are free

I've had a few good freebies in my time as a journalist.

• I've sat in the back of a C-130 Hercules as it lowered its back door and a squad of paratroopers jumped out
• I've flown in the rear gunner seat of a World War II Japanese Val dive-bomber in a re-enactment of the Battle of Pearl Harbor (this was for the Tora Tora Tora air show in Little Rock, so there were a few historical inaccuracies, such  as the US Air Force winning the battle, but I digress...)
• I've had a press trip to the French Pyrenees mountains
• and my shelves have always been groaning under the weight of hot-off-the-press review copies of books.

So it has come as a pleasant surprise to discover that even in my new life as a teacher there are quite a few freebies, and these are all the better because they are gifts given freely, without strings attached. Recently, students have given me Blue Mountain coffee, Harrod's tea, apple cookies, Korean seaweed, sweeties from Tokyo Disneyland and a tin of biscuits from Hong Kong Disneyland. But today's haul has been among the best. I got two bags of delicious mange tout picked by the fair hand of one of my students from her allotment at 6.30am today, and then two half-litre bottles of home brew reminiscent of the great beers you could get at that real ale joint between The Dolphin and The Bless in Derby city centre (the name escapes me) from the mother of one of my five-year-old students. We fried the mange tout and supped the beer for dinner. Cheers!

Going through a bad spell

One of the perils of being an English teacher abroad is it doesn't take long before you forget bits of your mother tongue. In a lesson today with a very nice lady whose daughter lives in Germany, the need for a term for knives, forks and spoons came up and I had to look it up in the dictionary to check the number of 't's it needed. The word, of course, is 'cutlery'. Incidentally, my student said she was eager to learn English partly so she could communicate better with her German son-in-law. I suggested that wouldn't it be better to simply learn German, but she replied, "Oh no, his English is very good!" Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, my spelling has never been brilliant, but out of the daily newspaper game, occasional reading and this blog are the only ways of sharpening the blunt edges of my spelling. When I was in America writing obituaries for the Log Cabin Democrat (that's the newspaper's real name, by the way), I could always claim any misspelling was in fact just British spelling, and the excuse worked vice versa when I returned to Britain fresh from four years of looking everything up in my Webster's Dictionary. These days I have no excuses, and I find my trusty Concise Oxford English Dictionary is getting plenty of exercise. Now, I just need to work on my Japanese kanji...

French is the way forward

I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of a language that has no masculine and feminine inflections and has words that most of the time are easy to pronounce. Yes, I'm talking about English, and frankly, I think it has had its day. Far too many people speak English already, and everyone else who doesn't yet speak the lingua franca wants to speak it. It's time we fought back. I think French is a far superior language and culture and henceforth we shall be conducting all lessons in French and shall be adopting French forms of address and styles of dress. This will be the last post in English and from now on please refer to this school as Le Tour de Francais. Avec poisson d'Avril. 

A Japanese tea ceremony

I've had a couple of nice e-mails recently from family in the States and friends in the UK, thanks to all for writing, and as is becoming a familiar refrain, sorry I haven't written back to most, but I am thinking of you. A former colleague at a Midlands newspaper (that shall remain nameless)  wrote how she would love to see the sub-editors department performing  "I'm a Little Teapot" every morning. The Japanese are often lampooned for the exercise rituals observed at more conservative companies, but I can see benefits. Nothing would cut a pompous boss or middle manager down to size like a public exhibition of his or her handle-and-spout/tip-me-up-and-pour-me-out moves. I can think of several former bosses whose daily dose of humiliation would benefit office morale, I'm sure you can too.

Moving the goalposts

If Tower English were a Premier League football club, which would it be? It's a question that has vexed me of late, and I'm sure it has you too. I think we can safely rule out the extremes of soon- to-be-done-for-Derby and the perennial big four. I'd like to think we have a great youth policy - we have just signed five new students from our playgroup youth academy - while attracting our fair share of out-of-favour stars from other schools (such as the relegated Nova). I think Portsmouth are where we are this season, though we have no chance of silverware in our cabinets yet. Our goal this year is mid-table mediocrity, but it's a funny old game. 

Flushed with success?

Today was a good one for confirming that the wife and I were right to up sticks and start afresh in Japan running our own business:

1. I got an e-mail from England from a former colleague who quit newspapers for the bright lights of PR. He said he was loving his work now. In his old job at a UK local newspaper his writing would have been read by a handful of folk in the immediate circulation area, whereas now, in the age of cut-and-paste journalism, he gets a kick out of seeing his phrases reproduced around the globe - thanks to the wonders of technology and diminishing budgets for journalists to actually do their own writing and research.
2. One of my students has just started a new job in Tokyo at a fashion company, and while she is hopeful that it will turn out fine, she was a little put out to discover that far from the thrusting big-city operation she was expecting where she could use her (rather good) English-speaking ability, she has found herself, after an hour wedged in a packed morning commuter train, typing up bills of lading all day long. There are no restaurants or cafes in the area so she has no choice but to eat a packed lunch around a table with her immediate colleagues. All well and good, but the only toilet is on the same open-plan floor as her office, and has paper-thin walls. The result is everyone in the department can't help but monitor the eating, working and toilet habits of their colleagues.
   

The moral of the story? My commute is 30 seconds (from futon to classroom), I can write what I want, eat with whom I choose and have an upstairs and downstairs loo. What luxury!

All play and no work

If you wanna play, you gotta pay, as Bruce Springsteen famously said to folk not dancing at the back of one of his concerts. Well, our mothers get a full workout as well when they bring their toddlers for a dose of English at our twice-weekly playgroup surgeries at a local dance studio. Pictures courtesy of our unofficial photographer, May Arai. Just what the doctor ordered.