Halloween in Nagoya

October 31, 2004

Well, not really Hallowe’en, but it was the Nagoya leg of the Nellie’s Bookstore tour. And that was really good. The room filled to capacity when my presentation started and everyone had a great time with the Phonics CD ( showing off all the styles seems to work well, especially the James Brown, Fatboy Slim and techno style tracks!!). Plus of course the card game went across really well. Sales of the Superpack weren’t too hot, but that’s to be expected as most of the teachers in Nagoya already have the CDs. One interesting thing was chatting to the people on other publishers stands, of course they have to talk about their materials, but as it turned out most of them use Genki English when they go to elementary schools! That was quite interesting.

During one of the presentations I fired up my laptop with Ableton live and started jamming a new song. When I looked around everyone was crowded around looking at what I was doing. “Wow, that only took 20 minutes” was the common response, yep, 20 minutes plus 20 years experience!! But it is really fun so I’m definitely going to buy Live.

I also played the Teaching Guide Video on the stand, and that was really popular. I haven’t seen it myself for a while and it really does capture all the genkiness. This year was supposed to be the year of the Genki English DVD, but that failed miserably as most teachers are terrified of the technology! But I’m really thinking that it’s maybe worthwhile doing the kids videos on VHS! That should prove popular, but producing video tapes is a considerable investment to make. Certainly something to think about though.

Then in the evening I got round to tidying up the site and taking down the Halloween decorations. And as soon as I dead that a load of CD orders came through. Over the last couple of weeks internet orders have been a bit down and I’ve only just realised why, it’s because everyone was doing Hallowe’en lessons for the last month!! But things certainly look good for November as teachers start teaching other themes.

Then a bit more music work and finally to bed at 3 o’clock.

Plastic Food and Ableton

October 30, 2004

Plastic toy food is a common request for teachers of small groups, and I’ve managed to find some! So I put up an order form on the site today. I’m not sure how many of these I’ll be able to provide, but if you’re interested, click here for Plastic Food!!

I also did the November update of the Japanese pages with the mini cards and picture books. Last night I also found out that the “Submit your games” section of the site hasn’t been working ( another victim of all the spam attacks). So I fixed that and 2 new games came through! They came through titleless, so I called them “I’m going to …” and “Wow“. They seem really good! And if you have sent in games recently and they haven’t appeared on the site, please send them again and a million apologies!

Then I got on the Shinkansen for a 3 and a half hour ride to Nagoya. I was quite genki, but not up to doing office work, so I messed around with some song ideas. After I sold all my studio gear earlier in the year, I’m still trying to decide which new music package to go for, either Ableton Live ( pricey, professional, bit boring looking), Sony’s Acid ( fantastically easy to use, inspirational, touch pricey), Magix’s Music Maker ( dead cheap, really fun, but crashes and a bit of a toy) and Cubase ( major professional, boring, but I can upgrade my old version). It’s all very tricky! But anyway on the train I was messing around with Ableton Live and it is fantastic!!! The best thing I found is that you can play MIDI straight from the computer keyboard. Recently I’ve been buying up loop libraries, as real time playing doesn’t really work on a computer. But with Ableton it does! It’s cool just to jam away on the keyboard, start up another track, and add in some new stuff! Plus the effects are great, unlike Cubase they are really easy to set up and have cool presets to get you going straightaway. So I had a great time jamming away on the train ( don’t know what the people either side of me thought) and I wrote a really cool track, totally from scratch. That is good. I couldn’t save it because I only have the demo version, but I might buy this package. The only problem is that if I do get it I can quite see myself doing remixes and dance tracks instead of Genki English tunes!!

Then got into Nagoya and Star Wars was on telly, but I think I’ll wait till Christmas to watch it on DVD!

Not exactly brilliant

October 29, 2004

Had a school show this morning, and it didn’t quite go as well as it could. Well actually it was pretty bad to be honest. The thing is that it wasn’t anything big that went wrong, just lots of little things that piled up. For starters I was actually surprised that this school invited me back. It was one of the schools in the summer where some of the teachers decided not to attend my teachers workshop as I wasn’t Japanese! But the other teachers were very good, and so I figured they’d won the other teachers round. Then yesterday I got a call saying how the the 3rd and 4th graders are looking forward to the show. Now that doesn’t work! For a lesson, 3rd and 4th graders are fine, but for a “Show” I really need the 1st and 2nd graders there to genkify the other kids. Then this morning they’d changed the time to be for 2 hours, instead of one! That doesn’t work either as except for one very exceptional kindergarten in Saitama, no kids can stay that genki for over an hour. Then the sound system was in mono, but not real mono, just wired up wrong and it sounded really muffled, so I lost all the impact of the music. And I sat half an hour in the Head Teachers room waiting to be introduced, and he never even bothered to show his face!!

But anyway, they eventually got one 2nd grade class to attend, everyone piled into the gym and of course for the kids I gave it 100%.

And this is where the bad stuff started, because half the teachers just stood there looking foul faced. I asked them politely to help several times and they wouldn’t!! Not even a smile!! Talk about ungrateful, even if you don’t want to physically move, a smile is just common courtesy!! And you could just tell straight away with the kids. A few of the classes had kids where their eyes just sparkled, and were eager and excited and really got into things. These were the 2 or 3 classes with the genki teachers. The other kids just had nothing in their eyes, it was like all the lights were out as they took their lead from their teachers. Usually even the shy kids get all genki by the end of things, but these kids looked like they had been attacked by Dementors. So it was a bit fun, but it’s not going to do much for Genki English ’s reputation in the city! Usually in these situations I address the problems in the workshop, and in most cases it works if the teachers can see things from another point of view, but here they’d already had the workshop and the bad teachers had decided not to attend. Plus I always invite parents to shows, so that they can see the teachers in action, but of course today they decided not to invite them.

It’s a big shame really as the genki teachers here are really great and really do want to try hard and asked me to help, I wish I could have done more. It must be murder for ALTs who only have these types of dead teacher, who really if they were in any other industry would be fired!

So I’ll have to get another school to do a show in before the end of the year, just to show Genki English does work!! And work with the eager teachers in the school so hopefully the parents will start asking why there is such a difference in the kids.

Then I was home by 11!! So had a bit of lunch, felt good after doing an hour of exercise, watched a bit of TV and got on with some work.

Computer things

October 28, 2004

Wow at last a full day to get some work done! And I had a lot to do. I got the English newsletter sent off, and the Japanese one ready for proof reading. Then I updated the Christmas Song page to have ( some very Christmassy ) photos of the actions. It’s one of my favourite themes, so it needs to be done well!

I then had to spend a good couple of hours sorting out problems with spam and viruses on the website and order system. It is really annoying that I have to spend so much time doing stuff like that when all I really want to be doing is to be creating new stuff!!!

I also downloaded some new time management software. Now that I have a big screen to work with it’s worthwhile having.

And finally I got around to doing some music work at 10PM!! So I only had a couple of hours. But this is supposed to be my production time to get the new CD done!!

Teachers in Oita!

October 27, 2004

Got picked up at 1:30 and driven right to the other side of the island to a teachers meeting in Oita. Usually I do these things as a consultant hired by the school or board of education, but today the local school suppliers had brought me over and set everything up, so that meant I wasn’t allowed in to see what the teachers were studying in the other sessions!! And then my workshop was afterwards, billed as a talk about the Genki English materials. This is quite strange as usually I have to go out of my way to not mention anything about the CDs, but purely be there to help the teachers. But I actually did a standard workshop, with questions and solutions, rather than a bookstore sales pitch. Which I think confused a few people. But the teachers were actually really great and it most of them will probably buy the superpacks, which will keep the schools suppliers happy that they paid my travel expenses!!

In these sorts of meetings the teachers are very happy that my job is to sort out their problems, rather than bombard them with another theory or set of rules to abide by, which is what many presenters do. So the reaction was really good, and although the time was short, hopefully it will open the doors to some bigger, education focussed workshops in the future!

Sorting stuff out in Fukuoka

October 25, 2004

After a week of travels it took a couple of days just to get things sorted out and back on track

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