{"id":29663,"date":"2013-04-06T21:10:32","date_gmt":"2013-04-07T01:10:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/?p=29663"},"modified":"2013-04-06T21:10:32","modified_gmt":"2013-04-07T01:10:32","slug":"life-after-jet-teaching-perspective-from-kevin-stein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/2013\/04\/06\/life-after-jet-teaching-perspective-from-kevin-stein\/","title":{"rendered":"Life After JET: Teaching perspective from Kevin Stein"},"content":{"rendered":"

A great post<\/a> about teaching from\u00a0“The Other Things Matter<\/a>,”<\/strong> a great blog by Osaka-based ESL teacher\u00a0Kevin Stein<\/strong>. \u00a0Kevin is also the author of the article “Even a Native Speaker Stops Sometimes: \u00a0Helping Japanese Learners to Understand What is Said<\/a>.”\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

As many flavors of failure…<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

I came over to Japan for my first English language teaching job on the\u00a0Japan Exchange and Teaching Program<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0It was 14 years ago.\u00a0\u00a0I was living way out in the countryside and always looked forward to our big prefectural trainings.\u00a0\u00a0At that time, the program directors gathered up the assistant language teachers twice a year and plunked us all down in a hot-spring hotel for three days.\u00a0\u00a0During those trainings, I first learned how to use the International Phonetic Alphabet as a tool for pronunciation work.\u00a0\u00a0I learned about how to help students adjust to ambiguity in the language classroom (something I recently revisited thanks to the spring issue of\u00a0The English Connection<\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0And oddly (or perhaps not oddly at all), I met\u00a0John Fanselow<\/a>\u00a0for the first time.\u00a0\u00a0He gave a lecture on partial information which has stayed more than partially with me for over a dozen years.<\/p>\n

\n

I also remember one more presentation from the first training I attended. It was only thirty minutes or so long.\u00a0\u00a0It was given by a very unassuming high school teacher from Japan.\u00a0\u00a0He wore a short-sleeved cream colored button-down shirt with a brown necktie.\u00a0\u00a0He stood at the front of the room and started telling us about his bullet-train ride into the conference.\u00a0\u00a0He hadn’t brought much cash with him, so he bought a cheap Japanese lunch-box before getting on the train.\u00a0\u00a0He put his luggage and Japanese lunch-box on the rack above his seat, nodded to the business man sitting next to him, and then promptly took a nap.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When he woke up, he felt a little hungry, so he pulled down his lunch box.\u00a0\u00a0He was pleased to find that, even though it was a cheap lunch-box, it was filled with all sorts of strips of beef, some fatty tuna, and quail eggs.\u00a0\u00a0He was particularly happy about the quail eggs as they were his favorite.\u00a0\u00a0About half way through eating his lunch-box, the businessman next to him also woke up from a nap, stood up, and took down his own lunch-box.\u00a0\u00a0But as soon as the businessman opened the lunch-box up, he seemed to get very angry.\u00a0\u00a0The presenter said, “I wasn’t sure why he was angry.\u00a0\u00a0I guessed that maybe he was disappointed in his lunch-box.\u00a0\u00a0It wasn’t as nice as mine.\u00a0\u00a0It was the kind with sausages, not steak.\u00a0\u00a0Fried fish, not sushi.\u00a0\u00a0I felt very bad for him.”\u00a0\u00a0Then the presenter started laughing.\u00a0\u00a0A real solid laugh that, I think, made everyone else in the room want to laugh as well.\u00a0\u00a0“In fact, I was feeling bad for him when he turned to me and said….<\/p>\n

Click here<\/a> to read the full post<\/a> on Kevin’s blog.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A great post about teaching from\u00a0“The Other Things Matter,” a great blog by Osaka-based ESL teacher\u00a0Kevin Stein. \u00a0Kevin is also the author of the article “Even a Native Speaker Stops Sometimes: \u00a0Helping Japanese Learners to Understand What is Said.”\u00a0 As many flavors of failure… I came over to Japan for my first English language teaching […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,10,825,304,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-career","category-lifeafterjet","category-notable-jet-alums","category-writers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-7Ir","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29663"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29665,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29663\/revisions\/29665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}