Feelings . . . Nothing more than feelings . . .
...written on 2000-12-11, @ 21:19:29
Tales of Kim's Life in Japan
Mon December 11, 2000
One of the reasons I was so busy this week was that I had to give an English class for the teachers at my company. That was on Thursday, and I spent a good deal of time preparing for it around my other lessons.
My topic was "How to Better Express Yourself in English". Twelve teachers attended (the same number as last time, but with some new faces!). When they were all seated, I said "Good Afternoon" and they answered "Good Afternoon". I asked them "How are you?" and they answered "Fine, thank you, and you?" I stopped and shot them a puzzled look. "What," I asked "are all of you FINE?" I pointed to each of them and said "Fine, fine, fine, fin, fin, fi, fi, fine??" They laughed at the implication that they were all fine. I told them that one of the ways to better express themselves was to learn to communicate how they were really feeling.
I gave them a double sided worksheet with almost 400 feeling words on it, looked at my watch and said, "Woo, let's get started." They worried for a millisecond until they saw my mischievous expression and then laughed. I asked them to pick a word on the list that they knew and one that they didn't know, and write both of them down on the paper. I told them that everyone of them would learn at least one new word today, but that some would learn two, three, four and maybe even twenty new words. I then went around the room and asked them for their words. I wrote the harder words that they knew, but that others might not know on the board and wrote all of the words that they did not know on the board. As I explained the meanings of the words, I also rated them on my smiley graph on the board. I had drawn three faces, one with a big smile, one neutral and one with a big frown. I had the numbers 1-5 written underneath the pictures to indicate the level of feeling the word had ( 5 being extremely happy, 4-mildly happy, etc.) I had to explain "giddy", "dizzy", "funky", "zany", "foolish", "ugh", "infatuated", "grr", and "cosmic". I'm just glad they didn't pick "horny" and "flummoxed". "Cosmic" was the most popular word of the day however, because when I saw most of them later after the class and asked them how they were feeling, they said "Cosmic", which was good, because I rated that a 5 + on the feeling scale. Then I had them pair up and have a "How are you feeling?" conversation with their partners. Teacher A was to ask "How are you today?/How are you feeling?" and Teacher B was to use one of the words on the board as an answer. Teacher A was to then ask them why they felt that way and Teacher B was supposed to answer that question as well. I went around and eavesdropped. There were some very creative answers. Imagine having to explain why you feel "grr" or "ugh". After they did the partner work I asked them to share their feelings with the class. It was fun.
I then went over some points that I've heard them have trouble with such as the difference between "scared" and "scary", "borrow" and "lend", "come" and "go", and how to say "get well" instead of "become better".
I spent the remaining ten minutes talking about how to communicate better with the American teachers. Fred had passed on a lot of concerns to me from the Japanese teachers and after discussing the issues with Ivan and Chad, I wrote up a sheet addressing them. Some of the issues dealt with what to talk about in the car on the way from Hombu to the school branch, some dealt with what to say when you meet them at the main office. I explained that it was very important for them to tell American teachers their true feelings if they were busy and couldn't talk or if they indeed had free time and would like to go out and do something after class. I emphasized the importance of saying, "I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are saying. Could you repeat that, please?" I said Americans have a way of blundering on when they have a smiling, nodding face in front of them. I told them to tell us how they would like to be addressed, as in America we tend to be very informal and often call our bosses by their first name, whereas in Japan, even peer coworkers address each other by their family names.
Lastly, I told them that we, the American Teachers, were here to help them and the Japanese students learn English; that we wanted to share the Japanese culture with them as well as give them insight into our own culture.