I found school really boring.
At 16 I started teaching, and found that really boring too. The traditional
ways were switching students off left, right and center.
I quickly figured out the key was to listen to what students want to learn
and then find or create the most fun and motivating activities for them.
Just like you learn the lyrics to a favourite song or the latest baseball
statistics. You do it because it's fun. It becomes easy to learn.
I got a First Class honours degree from the University of Leeds and the
Universite Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France. I learnt to ski, became
fluent in French (so I could follow my studies), took a Tae Kwon Do instructor's
course, taught a course in Space Science for the UK's Air Training Corps,
won a presentation prize from Arthur Anderson, and played keyboards in
pubs and clubs on a Saturday night to pay for it all. When I graduated
I was invited to spend a week with every living Noble Prize winner in Germany.
That was fun.
Then I spent 3 years teaching full time in 3 Japanese schools. That was
really boring. Students were sleeping or not learning anything. So I become
fluent in Japanese and began transforming my way of teaching for languages,
English and International Understanding Education. After the Noble Prize
gig I felt I had a responsibility to help.
That's where I found out my way of teaching had a name: "Genki",
Japanese for "fun", "exciting" and "full of life".
After quite a bit of success on TV, magazines (I also taught NASA science
projects in junior high school) and helping other teachers become "Genki",
in the year 2000 I founded GenkiEnglish.com
Thanks to governments such as Thailand who have put Genki English into
every school in their country, there are several million students learning
with Genki English at the moment, in lots of different countries, so I
still fell a big responsibility to help.
These days half my time is spent travelling around the world giving workshops
and lectures for universities, education centers, boards of education,
and schools on how to really motivate students to get the best of out their
lessons. I do big huge conferences, but I also visit the tiniest schools
in the middle of nowhere.
The other half of my time is spent researching, developing, testing and
refining new Genki teaching materials. It's an ongoing process and there's
always something to learn. After finding out how to use games and songs
to such great effect, I'm always looking for the next "magic idea"
that will make things even easier to teach and understand.
Genki English takes up just about all of my time, but seeing new teachers
in Asia, India or Africa light up when their students begin to take an
interest in lessons again really makes it all worthwhile.
I still personally answer all my emails so eventhough it may take a little
while for me to reply, please feel free to
contact me if there's anything I can help with!
