Today, we went to the office as usual. We had several meetings which is par for the course I'm learning. They are surprisingly concise for what is being discussed and are effective and efficiently lead. Including everyone's ideas and writing down the good ones and throwing out the bad ones while still showing respect towards the person who suggested a poor idea, most of the time it comes from me to be honest since I don't know my way around the business world quite yet; but I never feel stupid for suggesting less than stellar ideas. As also is par for the course, I'm busy soaking up all the knowledge I can from everyone's input whether good or bad. I mainly pay attention to how the CEO and COO handle the meetings well, with respect and dignity extended to all parties and a genuine interest in making them feel valued.
In the afternoon, I met with a couple of the locals they have employed at the school to discuss what they wanted to learn during our English lessons this week that will be two hours each, once a week. I am looking forward to these private tutoring sessions immensely as my background is obviously in education and I even have a specialization in ESL, or English as a Second Language. First, I met with each employee separately to discuss learning goals and objectives to see what they wanted to get out of our relatively short time of only 8 hours of classes together. Originally, I was supposed to teach/tutor them together but they are at such different levels I decided it would be better to do it one on one. This is not possible in a regular class setting of course but is the ideal if you can get to that point. Deeram wants to practice writing, both personal letters as well as for business, with an emphasis on business English. He also wants to learn proper grammar for speaking English, which will honestly be more difficult for me but I have a wonderful mom who always tried to help us speak intelligibly as English was one of her passions growing up and I think secretly she wasn't about to let one of her sons sound like an uneducated fool.
Secondly, I spoke with Khongnin, who is at a lower level of English language learning but does understand you when you speak to her. We're going to work on her speaking so she can converse more easily; which might prove difficult since she is super shy even in her own language I've been informed. We are also going to work on pronunciation as that is a typically difficult thing for Asians in general, not to stereotype or anything but just like Americans struggle through their American accent in a foreign context so do foreigners struggle with their accents when speaking English. We will also work on basic reading comprehension as well as writing responses to simple passages of reading. All this may not be able to be accomplished in 8 short hours, but I'm sure going to do my best to help them both reach their goals.
I was also present during a meeting between Ryan and Matt discussing and writing down some S.W.O.T. analyses for different business ideas that another organization had asked them to do as consultation. I had never heard of a S.W.O.T. before so I will share with you what it consists of from what I learned about it today. It stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Strengths and weaknesses are internal, opportunities and threats are external, such as a competitor already in your location. While I found this interesting at first, I quickly lost interest as they started talking about costs associated with opening and maintaining a viable business as I don't know the cost of anything here so I was of little help to them at that point.
Afterwards, I spent time developing lesson plans for one of my students since we have our first session tomorrow and I really don't know that much about business so I mainly wanted to get some ideas down in a word document so I could do a little bit of research later. That's also something I'm learning lately. Teachers aren't the only ones that take work home, contrary to what you might hear in a school setting. In fact, I would bet most professions either take work home or stay late to get caught up everyday, unless you're in a secretarial role or something similar.
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