Mike's Farewell Party

Friday was Mike's last official day teaching at the Polytechnic, so we had a lunchtime "party". The students had bought flowers and gifts for Mike, and some of the students had been busy making cakes with their host families. Mike's wife made a Japanese curry dish, and our Japanese liaisons provided salad and sushi as well, so we ended up with a real feast!

Mike was really glad to receive so many gifts, and even seemed a little lost for words - very unlike him!

We are all sorry to see Mike finish, and we wish him well in his "new life" in Japan. Perhaps he will still find time occasionally to contribute to this blog??!!

Mike has been such a big presence at the Polytechnic and especially in making the C.E.E programme so successful. I know that it will be impossible to fill his boots, but I hope that I can make some small contribution towards keeping the programme running smoothly. I look forward to everyone's continued support.

I'll put some photos of the party on as soon as I can get some from the students!
Cheers
Nathan

Electrical Class

The students have been starting their engineering classes. Yesterday, Les Wong took them for their first Electrical class. It went really well and all of the students said that they enjoyed it. Today, the students had their first Computing class with Paul Admiraal. The students enjoyed getting use to computing by playing "Lightbot." The students had to move a man around squares and light light bulbs.

Here's a photo of the Electrical class.

Starting conversations

The homework for tonight was for the students to go home and try to initiate a conversation. Today is "Children's Day" in Japan, which is......... - your student will say, "oh, hey, did you know that it's Children's Day in Japan, today?"

Hopefully, you will say, "oh, no, what's that?" and then they're off!

We also looked at specific situations in the homestay where initiation by the student could happen. For example, you are drinking a cup of coffee, or you have just arrived home, or yawning.

Conversational Structure

Today, in class we learnt how to structure a conversation.

If the question is; what did you do today in Jean's class, then the format of the response should be something similar to:

General - well, today I learnt about text language

Detail - for example, emoticons and shortened language

Feelings - yeah, it was quite hard, but I could understand it in the end

Conclusion - yeah, so that's what we did, yeah - how was your day?

The students practised these conversations in pairs and then did line-ups.