Do I remember my first Cafetalk lesson?

I don’t know if it is a terrible crime or not, but I really don’t remember that crucial first lesson! (My apologies to the person in question.) I have now taught almost a thousand lessons so that is quite a few experiences to look back on. So many of them have been deeply memorable and educational for me that it is impossible to pick out that one initial lesson.

I suppose I was a fairly good (not great) conversation teacher at that time, but things have changed a lot since then. I have had to improve a number of areas over these past few years. A lot of it is about better human relation skills, to give people time to collect their thoughts and speak even if there seems to be a lot of silence. One of the biggest real world problems people have is to genuinely listen. The truth is that most of the time we tend to see conversation like a tennis match in which we are thinking about our comment or response while listening to our partner. Instead we should be like a detective and approach each person with the feeling that we want to find out about them. To genuinely listen is not hard but it takes a mind-shift and a little attention.

I guess I would like to feel that -every-lesson on Cafetalk is a -first- lesson. That is, it is new, exciting and challenging. See you in class.