Summer has broken from the barrier and it is hot and steamy. Stifling days are later punctuated by often fierce electrical storms. Birds sit open-mouthed and splay their wings on the ground to get relief. There is a growing lassitude.

Having finished an online Certificate of Tesol recently, I have just begun the free add-on Certificate of Business English. I seems unlikely that any great joy can be derived from teaching course book BE ( have a look for yourself) but there is a lot to be gained from teaching a more general ESL with business characteristics, so to speak. This was my approach when Yes English landed a BE contract with a Kaibara-based engineering company (Everloy Nozzles) around 2005.

I took the class over about a year later and quickly jettisoned the awful course book that nobody in the class appeared to understand. In practical terms, these students, all engineers, did not need the grindingly dull terminology of business speak, but rather, a way to communicate in English with their Chinese peers. So this is what we did, adding little relevant asides that touched upon the kinds of technical terms that might arise from the work that they did.

I really enjoyed this class and was sad to leave them a year later. Sometimes my mind drifts to rural Kaibara and I wonder if those young engineers are still with the company, whether married or not, or if they still hang out at Panchinko Parlours, where the whirl of noise and smoke is their lot.

A couple of photos won't go astray here. In the first I am approaching the company on the way to a lesson. The second is a group shot of my final class, in the board room, no less.