“If they like something, they want to come to your classroom, they want to communicate with you, so then the language naturally comes through that. And I think that at an early age, if you can get them to like something, everything is much easier. “But I was very quickly able to entertain them to get their attention, I was able to entertain and teach them. We are not just doing something for no reason, there is always some value there.” “We have a little phrase that I like to use, which is that we are silly but not stupid. And I thought: OK, how are we going to do this? And it was a whole class of two- to three-year olds and obviously they spoke no English.
“And when I moved to Japan, they opened the door on the first day and said: here is your class. “So I started to try to entertain them a little bit, I learnt some magic tricks and I learned to juggle just to enjoy a bit of fun with my younger cousins. So I wasn’t quite cool enough to be with the older cousins and I was put on the small Christmas table, although I wasn’t such a small kid. I have some much older cousins, than there is a bit of a gap, then it’s me and then a lot of younger cousins. “Japan essentially brought together a lot of my history. This is how he discovered his gift of teaching small children, as he told me when I visited his studio in the north Bohemian town of Liberec: When he got a chance to train as an English teacher in Japan, he didn’t hesitate and moved there. Steve Watts originally studied hydrology, but he soon discovered it wasn’t what he wanted to do with his life.
0 kommentar(er)
