I’ve been looking forward to this workshop for a while now, instead of a 1 hour “sales pitch” or 3 hour introduction, I have three full days of professional development workshops which is itself part of a 2 week long programme. About half the participants were elementary school teachers and about half were student teachers. And wow was I surprised at how shy the students were! Teachers are usually no problem once you get them warmed up, but the students were pretty much near the beginning of learning to be teachers and were very unsure of themselves. Mind you the TV cameras might not have helped! But after a few activities they started warming up. Usually with workshops it’s the talking bits that get all the “oohs” and “aaahs” with Elementary school teachers as we go through curing their problems, but with the students it was more of case of actually teaching them using Genki English, rather than explaining things. ( The How are you? Monster Game bombed, but the bargaining game rocked!)

In fact in the afternoon I started off with the Hip Hop songs, which they really got into ( I was quite surprised!).

The great thing about having 3 days is that you can introduce bad games that a lot of schools use, and as they are actually playing them ( instead of teaching them ) , they realise how ineffective some things can be. For example we did the basic karuta, where the teacher just says a word, and the kids take a card ( we were all sat in a circle with the cards between us). They quickly twigged on that they weren’t talking, and that only using words without any context was pretty useless practice. So they started asking me “What’s your favourite food?” and I answered and they slapped the card. That then led them into seeing that it’s not much of an improvement as they could be speaking completely nonsense words and it wouldn’t matter. So then we did the best variation where each person asks me in turn “Do you like …?” + one of the foods. I either answer yes or no. They quickly saw how this helps especially the shy kids as everyone has to listen really carefully, but then off course explode into action when the answer is “Yes”.

And we finished off with the exchange projects for 5,6th grades and the importance of teaching what we do.

So it was tough, and not the easy ride it would have been if everyone had actually taught in elementary school and had some teaching experience, but things sort of worked out towards the end.

Then a quick rest ( and check to see the TV report) and out for a very nice steak dinner!