Monday, November 15, 2004

New Job

I started a small part time job today. I'm teaching 5 beginning level students at their company north of Yokohama, about 20 minutes from my house, for an hour and forty-five minutes, twice a week. I was kind of nervous this time because I've never done a real business English class, and that's a long time to be teaching a single class. This time, a lot of time was taken by an orientation from the head of the company I'm working for, but I don't know how I'm going to fill that much time next time. The conference room that we're using has a projector, so I might be able to bring some movie clips of something for listening practice or something, but I'm not going to be ready for that for a while.

The students are two women and a man in their late 30's, one guy in his 40's, and a young guy probably in his late 20's. The oldest guy is the best, but they are all pretty low level. Of corse, all of the have "studied" English ever since junior high, but in Japan, that usually doesn't mean much. After studying that long, their listening and reading is okay, but speaking is not that great. Still, it's nice to be teaching adults that can at lease understand what I'm saying for a change.

This small job will end up making me ¥50,000 extra a month (about $500) which will be nice if I go on vacation early next year or decide to move. The bad thing is that I'm stuck doing it every monday and friday until the end of March, so I don't even get to take a long weekend until then.