The thing about being really good at something, even speaking English, is that you don’t realise what sounds impressive to your average person on the street. And hence what will motivate them to learn.

I had another DJ lesson today. Last week was a bit boring so I asked the teacher to teach me some cool sounding ( looking?) stuff. The thing was he couldn’t think of anything!

Luckily I’d been in the record shop and bought some battle DJ records. And the guy in the store told me my teacher is a world class DJ. The thing is I wasn’t sure last week, as he was just doing the basic “from the beginning” beginner textbook stuff for us. So today I gave him the new records and he was just playing around with them, which to him was nothing special, but to us it sounded amazing! That’s what we want to learn to do! I really got excited about the lesson.

So if you teach English, every once in a while you want to “accidentally” let your students hear you on the phone or chatting to friends. Make it fast and funny. They’ll be impressed, it’ll motivate them more and it will make them respect you more ( this is especially true if you’re a non-native speaker). The best teachers will then give the students a few little “cool” sounding bits and pieces to use themselves so they can show off to their friends, and realise that with a bit of hard work they can eventually do it too.

The teacher today rounded things off with an amazing mix of London Bridge ( the Fergie, not the shogakkou version.)