In my lesson last night with a young businessman, I was covering the first lesson about numbers. This student is a man-to-man student and is moving pretty fast. Especially, he seemed to have little trouble with numbers. The only funny thing was that he sometimes would say “47” instead of “57” etc. when that appeared in the middle of one of the long numbers. He always caught and corrected himself. So that was OK. After reviewing the populations of several countries and all of the cards with the big numbers, I decided to write the US Federal Budget number up on the board and see if he could read that too. US Federal Budget: $2,387,000,000,000. He was able to read it of course. I then showed him what the US takes in in terms of tax revenue and showed the difference below that in red. I showed it in red because that is what it is….RED INK and it’s nearly $400,000,000,000 per year which is approximately equal to the amount of interest that the US pays on the national debt each year. I then wrote up the number for the US national debt. $8,948,542,648,000. Those numbers caught his eye and he asked, “who will pay it?” I said “I don’t know but not me as long as I am in Japan.” He laughed a little and said that Japan too is getting into such a situation.
We finished the numbers lesson with the “wish lists” dialogue and then reviewed his actual morning routine in past tense. We followed with a One Point on being “ripped off” and how some restaurants can also be a “rip off” if they charge too much for food that is not very good or too little. He got the meaning of this one point and was very pleased with the lesson.
Another fun lesson was finished as was my work day as this was my last student for the night. Time to go home and rest up for the next big day!
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