Hmm...

Here's a fun combo for you:
Take a brand new student who speaks virtually no English.
Recommend she take private lessons with a foreign teacher (ie, me) who speaks virtually no Japanese.
Have no lesson plan but what the student brings with her on the day.
Have the student learn phrases of which she is lucky to understand one word in ten.
Huzzah!

When I went to training yesterday I was interested to hear that most of the other foreign teachers do not teach the raw beginner classes. Me, I do. In these classes I have a few students who can't even understand 'what did you do on the weekend?' or 'today, you are in the office'. You learn to work with it and become a dab hand at ways to increase their chance of understanding. (For example if I want to ask what they did on the weekend, I'll start by saying what I did, then ask the most experienced student.)

But a private lesson with no structure? Muzukashii ne... For example I wanted to ask 'which sentences do you need to practice?' and 'how many are there?' I tried every possible permutation of those questions. I made them so simple they weren't even grammatically correct. I don't think she knew the words 'how many', or 'sentence', or what I meant by 'what ones'...

Anyway, it really wasn't that bad, and fortunately, the student was very nice, I just didn't feel like I was the best teacher for the job...