Life Lately - From Teaching Adults to Children
Can you recall your elementary life?
Those wake-up calls from Mom or your alarm clock, but you're still dizzy, wanting to stay in your warm blankets a little longer.
How about your classmates who joined you during recess, lunch, and playtime?
How about the clubs you entered?
It was where you met your seniors and juniors and built amazing friendships. The clubs that honed your talents and skills.
How about the competitive quarterly exams you needed to pass that made you tense?
Lastly, how about the most influential teacher that significantly impacted you in some ways?
For almost a decade, I have been a language educator to adults mostly.
The beginning of my "just job turned career" was rough as my skills were not solid compared to those licensed educators who dedicated four years of intense study and exposure to the teaching world.
2018 was the year I thoughtfully carved my stepping stone, my dedication to teaching.
I passed CELTA with flying colors, not knowing it was just the birth of an unexpected reroute.
Reroute? What do you mean?
I have enjoyed teaching adults and am still teaching now and forever will.
Conversing with adults intending to push their learning limits more to pass the requirement, whether in a job or personally, like traveling and making friends internationally, is always memorable and noteworthy.
Listening attentively to their success and failures humbled me, and the banters and wisdom in each student I had were like fingerprints stamped on me.
That stated above reminded me of my long-time fear as an educator - teaching younger children—my unfinished task.
Well, I have been teaching speaking lessons to teenagers online, and my youngest is a 9-year-old boy.
But teaching offline, physically, was quite nerve-racking for me.
Why?
Online, you can engage the students in the lessons by providing digitally colorful activities, videos, and music.
Thanks to the rising technology that made our job easier as students are somehow oriented and entertained by social media.
My 9-year-old male student seemed to like the games I prepared for our online lessons.
I am still exploring other interactive lesson plans to keep his focus and my goal, which is vocabulary retention. It is the challenging part.
Offline, apart from the fact that teaching in Japan requires you to wear formal to business casual - 'wear-your-profession,' hindering me from moving freely, I always wonder if I could be on par with the children's energy which I only sometimes have.
The fear that students will get bored with my class is something I need to prepare to experience.
Then, out of nowhere, the opportunity came to me.
Someone wanted me to home-tutor her 8-year-old child.
It was the best decision and leap I have ever made in my teaching career this year.
Her hunger for learning and fun nature made me want to improve for her and my other students. I am blessed and inspired.
Now, the fear is slowly subsiding.
And, by the way, I just got more teaching children home-tutor jobs. Hooray!
It is odd, but I am enjoying this new chapter of my life now.
I am nervous, but I am more interested to know where this new journey takes me and my growth in the following years.
My conclusion. I may have just started teaching the young, but even from that fact, I want to be that mate/pal they shared their break time with, the friend in an English club, or the English tutor that gives them an enjoyable and extraordinary English learning life.
So, that's the reason for my two-month hiatus from making blogs. I was too busy challenging myself and making new younger friends. Haha. 
To all our students: HONTO NI ARIGATOU GOZAIMASHITA!
( Some snacks my home-tutor student gave me after our lesson.)
'Till my next blog. Ciao! 
Mei