First Student!

by AJ

Rock and Roll, I have my first student! Her name is Tomoe, and she lives in Osaka.

Tomoe is a thirty year old manager who works for a large Japanese company. She has a Masters degree in marketing.

She is now planning to get a Phd, and wants to study in Europe or America. Thus, she needs to improve her English in order to score well on the TOEFL and GMAT, and to prepare for graduate study in an English only program. Another goal for Tomoe is to improve in English in order to better communicate with her international friends.

I sat with Tomoe and together we developed a course outline. The course "title" will be "Visionary Management (English)". It will be formed around a book called "Built To Last" a "visionary management" business book that Tomoe read in Japanese, but wants to read in the original English. Tomoe bought the English version today.

My task now is to build a web of comprehensible input, confidence builders, and communicative activities around the topic of visionary management. As Im not a manager (much less a visionary).. Ive got a lot of hyper speed research to do (starting with reading "Built To Last").

My next step will be to search out related articles. Luckily, Tomoe is a fan of Steve Jobs, Seth Godin, and Tom Peters! (talk about synchronicity)! So Ive got a head start in that department.

Next, Ill look for audiobooks on this topic... maybe including an audioversion of Built To Last. Recordings of speeches by various visionary leaders might also be good sources. Ill transcribe the shorter ones myself.

Next, we'll choose some movies to work through. She said she'd like to start with Patch Adams, as she feels he was a visionary leader who challenged the medical field. Shes seen it many times with Japanese subtitles... a good start as this experience should help to make the English only version more comprehensible (Ill help too, of course).

We will communicate using Skype--- starting with our book/film club discussions and article reviews.

My next job will be to make some original recordings of conversations related to visionary management... perhaps starting with conversations between me and a friend.

Finally, Ill eventually try to get her writing on a blog... or Wiki... and will add my rewrites in the comments section of her posts.

Of course, all this is likely to evolve, but this is my starting plan.

I just hope I can pull off a consistently great course,.... because unlike at a school, there's no room for mediocrity.