To Become a Teacher M.N. Doshisha International Jr/Sr High School, Kyoto, Japan

To be honest, I've never been abled to feel at ease with teachers. While everyone else was talking to teachers in a friendly, relaxed manner, I was always on my best behavior, a little bit up tight. I could never relate to teachers. Maybe I was always trying to keep my distance. I don't know the reason for this however I took it for granted and never even thought about it. However, after actually becoming a teacher, I started to think again. One hot afternoon, at the end of last summer, when I arrived home from school, my mother came out from the kitchen eager to tell me some news. One of our neighbors asked my mother to ask me whether I wanted to teach her son and his friends English after school. After I heard about the news, without hesitation I said, "Yes, of course!" I was over the moon. Since living in UK I had always wanted to teach little children English. My mother told me to phone Mrs. Ito as soon as possible so I grabbed the phone and the telephone number from the living room and rushed excitedly to my room. On the phone, Mrs. Ito sounded very kind and she explained about the children and the type of lesson she expected me to teach. There were in fact three children in the class: her son Kei, 10 years old, his friend Taiki, 10 years old and Taiki's sister Marie, 11 years old. Mrs. Ito wanted me to teach at her house on Wednesday evening from 6 o'clock and she told me to use her dining room as a classroom. She asked me to choose a textbook that would be suitable for the children. So the next day, on my way home from school I dropped into "Kinokuniya", the biggest bookshop I could think of, expecting to choose the textbook. I was surprised to see five shelves of every type of children's English textbook imaginable. After an hour of careful investigation I chose a textbook called "Our World" for the lesson. In that text book there were number of categories such as listening, speaking, writing and singing. In the textbook there were series of cartoons, which I was sure that children would definitely enjoy.

The day of the first lesson came. On that day I was really excited from the morning and I was thinking about what to talk to them even during school. I came home trembling with joy. I quickly packed my textbook, a cassette tape and a worksheet that I made in my bag and skipped to Mrs., Ito's house. When I arrived at her house, children were already sitting at the table with a sheet of paper and a pencil case. "Hello everyone! My name is Masari. I'm 16 years old. Can you introduce yourselves?" I said to them with a big smile on my face. I tried my best to be as friendly as possible. After I said that they started to introduce themselves exactly like I did one by one. My first impressions of them were not that bad. They looked quiet and a little bit shy. I took out the textbooks and told them to write their name in English. I was rather surprised that Mrs. Ito was monitoring my teaching, but I tried not to care about that too much. After few minutes of text reading, I could tell that boys were getting bored. They started to have their private conversation between themselves about school and their friends. "Hey, it's nearly time for POKEMON." Taiki said to Kei in a whisper. "Oh no, I forgot to video it! Shall I do it now?" Kei looked at me as he said. I told them to concentrate but their mind was full of POKEMON, absolutely no space for English to slip into their mind. Mrs. Ito said to Kei that he must listen to me but it had no effect. While I was thinking what to do, Taiki suddenly said, " What time does this lesson end, Kei? I'm bored." I just couldn't stop blaming myself that they were acting that way. My confidence was destroyed. I went home down in the mouth after the hazardous first lesson. I was so embarrassed with myself that I was helpless and I couldn't even tell off junior school children. When I got home, I went up to my room and thought about what to do next lesson. I really understood that I was taking tutoring too easily, so I decided to think hard, how to get on with the children in order for them to listen to my lesson. But in the end I decided to take the offensive. It's so obvious that I was only a beginner with teaching. In that case, I thought that I shouldn't act too much like a teacher but I should act as I am. I realised that if I act naturally, they'll hopefully start to feel at ease and they'll be able to feel close to me more. Next lesson, I started to have more conversation with them in more of a relaxed way. If they weren't concentrating I told them off and I let them talk about themselves more in order for each one of us to know each other.

I decided to act not like their boring teacher but more like their sister. After doing that their attitude began to change and they started to listen to me more. I was abled to teach them comfortably and naturally because they began to be more cooperative. In another words, they started to open their heart to me. This happening gave me a chance to think about teachers, which I never tried to think about. I realised that it is an incredibly hard work what teacher had to cope for each lessons and added to that teachers had to make a lot of effort to get on with all of us. I'm only teaching three pupils but I think I understood that difficulty well. I'm feeling much closer to teachers at the moment.

Nagata, Masari (2000). To Become a Teacher. Retrieved March 25, 2001, from the Doshisha International Jr/Sr High School web site: http://www.intnl.doshisha.ac.jp/projects/3sa/2000/memoir/sa2/e28-masari.html

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