Fun, effective and with lots of information about Japan

Unbelieveable! I would not have imagined how much is possible to achieve in 4 weeks. It was really intense! And still, we had much fun together. Larry and Dave understood well to make it lively, real and interesting. The best approach to learning seems to be forget about learning. It's got to be fun! So we started even the driest subject of grammar with a game. Thus I lost my fear of incomprehensible theoretical gibberish. No need to prepare beforehand something which can not be learnt anyway. It is communication that matters and rather less form. We stuck to this principle of communicative language teaching which was pretty enlightening to me as someone who learnt English the hard way.

I found particularly valuable the personal experience about teaching in Japan Larry and Dave shared with us. For this reason alone I would not have wanted to take the course somewhere else. My lesson plans did not work in practise. Surprise! Probably the hardest thing for a teacher is to make his plan work. As a novice I would have liked more guidance how to achieve this and keep my students happy at the same time. Maybe an extra week would do the trick?

In my view this course is a solid grounding on the way of becoming a teacher. I highly recommend the course to anyone interested in teaching in Japan. It made me aware of what it might mean to become a teacher and now I see the work ahead. The course book says "teaching is like dancing". The course was about learning the steps. Nice to know that I can come back to Dave and Larry with questions when I practise my first steps alone. I enjoyed the course and will not just remember when I go through my comprehensive notes in the future. It will be a reference for me!