These second time schools are something special. Last time I did the basic show here in November, and today I figured on doing something a bit more challenging, so after the usual warm ups, we went through “What do you do?“. That was amazing, the whole school, 6th graders included, were just enthralled by it. They came up with lots of great gestures for the jobs, and picked up on lots of the little extra bits. For example I’ve only ever taught this song with picture cards before. But today I had a projector, and part of the “Teacher” card has an animation that goes:
4 + 3 = 8 X
3 x 4 = 9 X
1 + 2 = 3 
The kids were so interested in why there was a tick on the final one, because of course in Japan, both a cross and tick means “wrong”. It’s little things like that that keeps the kids attention and lets you keep moving on to the next set of things to do. The sound system was crystal clear today and I did all the pronunciation coming from the computer ( so the teachers could see they don’t actually have to have perfect pronunciation themselves, they just press a button and the kids copy the sound from the computer), and the kids could speak so well. Then it came to final word where they have to say what they’d like to be. With 149 kids I figured that might turn into chaos, but they were really cool with it. Lots of them were saying things like “denkiya san” or “Pan ya san”, so I figured “shop keeper” is the best for that. Then others were asking about “Sakaa Senshu”, so I asked them what “Sakaa” is in English, which they said “soccer”, then taught them “player” for “senshu”. Then when other kids asked for “Yakyu Senshu” I simply had to say “You tell me! What’s “yakyu” and what’s “senshu”" to which they replied “baseball player”. If the kids aren’t really interested at this point, when they come to sing in the song they sort of shut up when they have to say what they want to be. But not here, they sung the whole song beautifully and were shouting out what they wanted to be on the final verse! Excellent. Because that’s what it’s all about, getting the kids to think big. This song usually takes 40 minus, but they had it mastered in 20. The other good thing about this song is that instead of the “What would you like to be?” line, it’s “What do you do?”, psychologically it’s so much better to have yourself say “I am …” rather than “I want to be…” with whatever goal you wish to make true.
So a perfect school.
Then things went a bit downhill at the next one! It was the first time I’ve visited this school so I knew I’d have to start off simple and work through all the confidence training. Things looked good at the beginning though as the Head teacher said “I’m a little bit afraid that the kids may be too genki for you today”. Well, in the World of Genki English there aint no such thing as “too genki”! But when the kids walked in they were the quietest bunch of kids I’ve ever seen anywhere in Japan! These were 1st to 4th graders and they were like zombies!! Oh… So I started to liven things up a bit and what happens, the school chimes start playing, which cuts off the sound system!! So I had no music!!!!!!!!!!!!! Arggghhhh.. Well, I did have some but it was so small as to be unusable. So the only thing I could do was to do like I do in some of the bookstores, get them to be 100% genki, but in a whisper!! Which sort of worked, ish. But these kids could really have done with the loud music to wake them up. The music is also good for getting them quiet when the song has finished. So anyway things weren’t too good so I figured I’d try the How are you Monster Game. As usual I asked the teachers to help as 100 kids is a lot to control in 10 minutes. But they just sat their doing nothing! So we started and half the kids were cheating ( jumping lots of steps instead of just one). So I asked the teachers to help again, and they refused to help again!!! My goodness! I tried one more time and the kids who were misbehaving were going too far, so I stopped the lesson, told them all to sit back down where they started and went into my serious “teacher mode” of saying “Well, you know I planned on doing something fun at this school. But the next time the BOE or newspapers ask me what you were like I’m just going to have to say how rude you all were and wouldn’t play fair.”. Needless to say this shocked the kids and I think also the head teacher as lots of parents were present! If it was my own class I’d have simply stopped things there and done some really boring work as a punishment, but here this was about all the punishment I could give. So I just stood at the front, looking all disappointed at them. It was a big contrast to all the genkiness before! And eventually they started to apologise. So I asked what impression of the school they wanted me to walk away with, and they said they wanted to be seen as good kids, so I asked what should we do, and they asked to play the game again, this time listening to what I had to say! So that’s what we did, I dialled up the genkiness back to 100 and they had a great time with the game, really enjoyed themselves and obeyed all the rules. So that was very hard work, but we got a good result in the end!
Then onto the 3rd school of the day ( they’ve been working me hard!).
This was another “second time” school like the first one today so I was expecting good things! But I started with “Can you do it?” and got a cheeky bunch of 6th graders shouting out “No!”. OK, so time to stop again! Most kids in Japan are great and respond really well to the “Dekiru, dekiru, dekiru” ( I can do it!) stuff, but sometimes you do get the cheeky kids and the trick is to just to say “eh, why not?”. To which they usually just say, “Oh sorry, we were just joking”, but you certainly do have to address it, as it’s impossible to continue otherwise. This week I have the added advantage of the World Cup and saying, “Well, do you want the Japanese team to go around thinking “dekinai” ( I can’t do it) for the Croatia match?” to they all replied “No way!”. So, Soccer and English are the same, “Dekiru to omoeba dekiru!”. Which eventually got them onside!
The sound system here was really rubbish and although we did the “What do you do?” song, it took a good 40 minutes to do it ( which is the average), so we only had time for “Thank you” at the end. They did come up with some good gestures for What do you do? and were again asking lots of questions about the animations. But my voice was absolutely killing because the mic was next to useless! But at the end we had 200 very motivated and very excited kids who had learnt a lot of new English and were very happy. So not bad.
Then a newspaper interview.
The best bit of today had to be this morning’s school though, they were amazing kids and teachers! The great sound system helped, but the fire those kids have is amazing!
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