On wednesday mornings I teach English at a pre-school for one hour.  Actually, I teach four year olds for thirty minutes and then five year olds for thirty minutes.   It is a pretty sweet gig.  When I was hired, I was basically told that, “we don’t care if the kids learn English we just want them to get used to hearing English and be comfortable with it.”  What it amounts to is that I play with the kids and use a lot of English and a lot of songs.  Being completely unable to carry a tune on my own I rely on songs made just for teaching English to kids.  These days the kids can’t get enough of the song “I am a Robot.”  I admit that it is pretty addictive.  The only lyrics are, “I am a robot,” “switch on,” and “switch off.”  The kids and I to a lot of dancing and walking like a robot and have a blast.  They love the song so much that they beg for the song as soon as I walk in the door.  I have a new policy that I must keep them occupied with something other than the robot song for 15 minutes before I give into their requests.  In case you were wondering, yes, they do request the song in English.  They have actually become amazingly good at requesting things, answering questions about themselves and talking about the weather. Next, we do the robot song.  Sometimes we follow that up with their previous favorite song “I’m a Super Hero.”

Today we talked about UFOs, green space-men with three eyes, and rockets to the moon before the Robot song.  We even fit in some practice counting down (by 10s from 100) to blast off for a rocket.  Last week I tried to mix things up a little bit by having them sing and act out “I am Monkey Robot.”  It was fairly successful.  One of my many favorite students, Kouki, requested that we do “I am a frog Robot” but we were nearly out of time and I hadn’t bribed them with their stickers yet.  The previous teacher always gave the kids a sticker at the end of the English lesson and she requested that I do the same thing.  It is a true bribe.  If I stopped giving them they would probably go on strike. Truthfully, I like giving the stickers.  I have the kids line up and they choose what sticker they want and I get to talk to each of them.  Another bonus is that the five or ten minutes that it takes to hand them out lets the kids mellow out before I hand them back over to the regular teacher.  I know that she appreciates that because I get them too hyped up for anyone’s good.

Alas, I digress.  Back to the story.  So today the kids requested the Robot song.  I said “let’s do frog robot today!”  They were ecstatic.  We started.  The song is relatively short, about 2minutes and 45 seconds.  We were all hopping up and down like frogs from a low crouch.  The song is high-paced and after about a minute I was out of breath and dripping sweat from hopping while singing.  I’ve had a cold lately so I briefly thought that was it and then quickly decided I was out of shape and possibly getting old.  I don’t think about getting older very often but it is a natural progression, I think, when you realize that you are hopping around on the floor in a Japanese preschool with five year olds while pretending to be a robot-frog. If I thought about it too much it could probably be the precursor to more dire ponderings about the twists and turns of my life. I buckled down and kept going determined not to show my age.

By that point we were into the last third of the song and there is a lot of starting and stopping as the kids “switch on’ and “switch off”.  An unexpected thing started happening.  With each successive on/off, fewer kids “switched on”.  They were more exhausted than I was.  By the end of the song all but three kids were sprawled motionless on the floor.  For the first time nobody requested a second playing of the song.  I know that they had fun but for next week they have requested “robot monkey”.  They said that one is better.  As a bonus, I can say that I have defied the forces of aging for yet another week.

–The Green Tea Dreamer