Hi, this is A.J. your English teacher, and today I want to tell you a story, a story about

one of my early experiences as a new English teacher.

And the reason I want to tell you this story

is that this story really shows why I developed the Effortless English system. It was one of the

key experiences in my life that led me to search for better teaching methods for teaching spoken English.

So this story begins, you know, several years ago, many years ago actually, at one of my early jobs as an English teacher.

In fact, I was not a full English teacher. I was just an assistant English teacher and I was teaching in Japan in a small village in Northern Japan.

And I was teaching, helping to teach middle school students. And so there was a Japanese English teacher, so a Japanese person was the main teacher.

She was the main teacher and I was the assistant teacher.

And mostly I just sat there and watched her teach and smiled a lot and

sometimes she had me you know read something from a book or something like that so I

really didn't do very much teaching.

But I remember the first day of classes, the first day of class.

So the Japanese teacher, Japanese teacher of English, and I walk into this class of middle school students.

And because this was a small town, the students were really, really sweet, very, very nice, kind, wonderful students. So we walk in, we go to the front

of the class and I look out and I see all these young middle school students and they're sitting at their desk very eagerly

They all have little notebooks and little pencils and pens arranged very neatly on their desk and they're all looking up at the teacher and at me with these big eyes

smiling and of course they're very curious about me because I was a, you know, this strange foreigner from America

and because it's a tiny little village in Japan, they didn't usually see foreign people.

So here they have this blue-eyed foreign guy in their class.

And they're all very excited and they're looking at each other and very eager and excited to start English class.

So the teacher, the main teacher,

...