My Nightmare

I had a middle aged student who was in a predicament. He had been restructured out of his job and, being the eldest son, was obligated to care for ailing mother at the same time. Truly in a bind. He came to GEOS in order to boost his TOEIC score and find a job in the pharmaceutical industry. He was a chemist of sorts.

"Tada" turned out to be my most difficult student. I had initially pegged him as having an intermediate grasp of English (that seemed to fit the stereotypical profile of a white-collar company employee). I soon realized that my bullshit chit chat tactics were not going to work on him (I also found out that GEOS is not generally equipped to handle students of his caliber). I was "trained" to "teach" your stereotypical low-level student and the school did not have suitable texts.

Tada spoke nearly perfect English and he and I should have been debating Japanese foreign policy or something worthy of his skill level. Tada was a nightmare come true for he would ask me complicated grammatical questions to which I could not readily answer. Even referring to grammar reference books weren't much help; a lot of rules and exceptions just looked like Greek to me. It struck me that I was a fraud as an English teacher(those 3 "training" days in Vancouver and professional development in Izu just didn't cut it). Tada had me quaking in my boots; I really wasn't qualified to teach this guy English and did not look forward to my private class with him for fear of looking like an idiot.

But, when I reviewed his past TOEIC scores, he admitted that he had problems with the listening section of the test. He had the grammar and reading down but listening was a weak point. So, we focussed on listening. I scrounged ALL of the school's texts for taped conversations and listening passages, recorded stuff off the TV, recorded my own material and wrote up comprehension questions in a bid to find something challenging for him. The prep work for his class alone took hours and by the end of his course, I probably had created a new listening textbook with the materials I collected.

It worked. Tada came every 2nd day for a month or two and we sat down and did my listening lessons. When his contract was up, he said thanks and that was the last I saw of him.

A few months later, I got a letter in the mail from Tada. In it was a photocopy of his TOEIC test score. He made 2 mistakes.