She surprised everyone, especially her fellow students, at least for a few seconds.

I have a student in my Sunday class who does so little it almost seems as if she’s merely auditing the class, not actually taking it. Her English level is low enough that I’m pretty sure she’ll never get the test scores required to go to a university outside of Japan. She’s also a lot older than most of my students–let’s just say she’s a lady of a certain age.–and I’m not sure why she’s taking the class.

She’ll do class work, but I usually put her in a group of three so that two students have someone to talk to. Her partners often lose patience with her, and I have to remind them not to abandon her.

If she does speeches, she usually reads the speech instructions rather than reading speech.

Today, though, when she got up to the front, she read something resembling an actual self-introduction speech. It was only twenty-eight seconds long and she never looked up from her paper, which meant she only got a few points, but it was twenty seconds longer than any other speech she’s ever done and was actually on topic which means she got more points than she’s ever received before.

The rest of the class was surprised and she seemed satisfied. I just hope she does it again, as there are still two speeches to go.