I got a call at 8:30 this morning asking if I could do a workshop at a school today. A little short notice but I know the head teacher so was cool. But he wanted it in the afternoon and I was already booked, which I explained, so he said “That’s OK, you can do it after the other school. I’ll pick you up”.

So off to the first school and they were a genki bunch of teachers. The workshop was in the big posh community center and after 2 minutes a guy came in and said we were too noisy!! Errr…. this is just me talking! The teachers hadn’t even begun to play the games ( where they get really noisy!). But we moved and it was OK. The funny thing was that after all the warm ups and intros and stuff, I got round to the “right, so what problems do you have?” part where usually the teachers pour out their problems about teaching English and we solve them one by one. But today they said “Oh, none, we haven’t started yet.”. “Oh OK, so you’re looking for ideas for when you do start?” I said, . “No, we just heard you did a really good workshop”. Well, OK, fair enough I suppose! So by the end of it they went from not even thinking about to English to actually being quite genki about it.

Then off to the next school. Here they’d been having a session from 1:30 where they’d been designing this year’s curriculum. I just popped along for the last hour to help them out a bit. Things started off really well, they were asking for fun ideas for the themes they’d chosen. The fun thing was that you could do every single one of them just with TPR!! “Sports” – say the sport and mime it out, “Colours” – touch something that colour. Very simple and they all looked very relieved! Then I had a quick look and noticed that they were teaching things like “Fine thank you. And you?” and things like “I like dog”, which are tricky to explain why they are wrong ( unless you make a joke out of them). So I asked where they got their ideas from, and they said they’d just copied other schools! Ah… that explains it, the designated study schools often make silly curriculums like this as they feel they have to do everything from scratch themselves, so end up with lots of strange English which then gets copied around the city. But I went through things with the teachers and they were quite cool.

They still didn’t get the “I like dog” vs. “I like dogs” point, which is fair enough as it’s a silly rule of English. Recently I’ve been using the new food theme and telling schools to just use the words marked there. But that does call on them to take things on trust, rather than really understanding things. So on the way back home I wrote a really groovy song called “What’s your favourite flavour?” which has “I like apple, I like orange” etc. so show how dropping the “s” usually means you like the flavour. Which is great for explaining why “I like dog” doesn’t mean “Inu ga suki”!

I tried recording it to put up on the site, but couldn’t get a funky enough backing going, but as soon as I do it’ll be up in the CD Owners Club!