My neighborhood sports about 5 different crêpe shops (or "crêperies", if you prefer. Actually, you'd probably prefer I stop being pretentious by spelling it with an "ê", regardless of what we call the places that sell the things, but, tough) scattered about, and they make a fantastic variety of fantastic-tasting crêpes. I'd already tried out these delicious morsels not too long after my initial arrival, but over the last few days the urge to eat more of them seems to be continually building–which is not so good for either waists or bank accounts. (Each crêpe costs from 350-500 yen, or $4.31-$6.15 USD.) But they're SOOOOO GOOD. My favorite variety of the moment is made with ice cream—or gelato, as the case may be—rather than whipped cream alone. I just devoured the following a few hours ago:
It was made with vanilla gelato (which you can see atop) and warm cinnamon-and-sugar'd apples below. (Much like apple pie.) Ooshii deshita! ("It was delicious!") And the pancake-y part, that is, the actual "crêpe" bit, was light and pleasantly textured. Superb-ful!
Last night, or maybe it was the night before that, I had some kind of chocolate ice-cream crêpe with I-don't-remember-what-else on it. This picture was taken after I'd gnawed on it a little, so it looks kinda less appetizing, but you get the idea:
So that's been my decadence, of late.
Last Saturday, I had my first actual experience with teaching, along with my first one-on-one the Friday before. The one-on-one meeting went alright: as I've mentioned before, it was mostly intended to be for assessing the student's level and educational desires/needs. I cut the meeting a little shorter than we were supposed to, though, since I kind of ran out of things to bring up, and by that point I'd already acquired enough information to start planning for a new lesson. It looks as though I will be focusing mostly on pronunciation, encouraging conversational fluency, and teaching some idiomatic English expressions–especially of the type that might come up in formal and informal business situations. My next meeting is tomorrow, and I'm still pretty unprepared, I'm afraid: while I kinda know what I'm aiming for, I'm still not sure about what to do, lesson-wise. Just drilling vocab phrases doesn't sound terribly exciting or effective, and it seems like the sort of thing a student could just look into on his/her own. I dunno.
But, you probably want to hear about how my lesson on Saturday went. The answer is: better than I expected. Our instructing took place at a Filipino community center, which offers free (I think) English lessons to Filipinos and whomever else wants them.
The class was divided into two main groups: Filipino adults and Japanese children. (Probably some were part Japanese, part Filipino.) I and the French TEFL trainee taught the adults, while the other trainees worked with the children. The teaching space was a little awkward, because it was a large rectangular room that we had to share with other "class" in session. Here, see for yourself. I'm sitting roughly in the center. Here's the right half of the room...
... And here's the left half:
Not even a partition to block sound. Ah well. It kind of worked.
Anyhow, we taught two at a time (one teacher on each half of the room) for about 45 minutes each. My lesson came later in the evening, with the adult students. They all spoke pretty competent English, so at first I was worried that my planned lessons would be too easy for them: but my lesson focused a lot on reading, and it turned out that was an area that did seem to need a little more help. (Side gripe: we trainees were given essentially no information whatsoever about the classes we would be teaching, aside from the vague categories of "low level" for the children and "intermediate" for the adults. Nothing about class-size, or any more concrete details about how their language sills. That made it kind of hard to design a lesson plan.)
Curiously, I didn't get near as nervous as I did for my first teaching practice, the one where other trainees were my "class." I was able to relax and flow with it a little more, though I still made a number of mistakes. I'm also a little unsure about whether my lesson plans are exactly conforming to TEFL International's standards, because they seem to be quite rigid in their expectations: there's a definite formula to follow, with particular components of the lesson which ABSOLUTELY MUST BE THERE. We shall see when I get feedback from the TEFL instructors tomorrow.
Urm, well, aside from that, here, have some more pictures!
Nifty window design:
A rather long corridor/tunnel/hallway under Tokyo station:
A small lounge / resting area in a shopping/commerce center near the station.
A very similar building as the last, looking downward into two different areas:
Yet more Tokyo at night:
This is Shin-Koiwa, the part of Tokyo that the community center's in:
Walking back from the community center, after teaching (kinda cruddy photos, beware):
Whoops, okay, time to resume narration for a bit. The "mastermind" behind this teaching-English-to-the-community plan is a lady who owns a bar in Shin-Koiwa; after the lesson was complete, we all trundled back to said bar, where we were treated to some genuine Philippine food. (There was essentially nothing vegetarian, *le sigh*, so I just kind of took dishes and picked around the meat. Ooh, though there was this delicious, meatless, sweet sticky-rice dessert. And earlier in the day, fried bananas. 'Course, they were probably marinated in kitten's blood and then fried in hippopotamus fat, or whatever it is you carnivores do to such things.) It was a cozy, noisy, very familial environment; kind of oddly comforting, even though half the time the conversation was in incomprehensible Tagalog.
My photos from inside are pretty lousy, I'm afraid:
... And then they started the karaoke machine, which was slightly less horrifying than you might expect. Those who sang actually had really pretty decent voices.
As a questionable bonus to you, here's some mostly indistinguishable "ambient" noise that I recorded on my phone during a short part of this. (I believe that's the guy sitting in a black shirt in the first photo, that you hear singing.)
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