A train at a very silly hour ( any train time that begins with 6 something can’t be normal), and finishing with a 30 minute taxi drive through the mountains ( don’t even imagine how much it cost!) , I eventually arrived at today’s school, right in the south of Oita prefecture.
The school here has been doing English pretty seriously for 3 years and the lady in charge is very much into things. She’d also seen a genki English workshop a few years ago so asked me to her new school for a show and workshop today. Things started out cool with lunch with the 5th grade kids, and they knew pretty much all the basic stuff and were quite genki! I did get a bit worried though that the teachers kept saying “our kids are shy”. Because usually that means the teachers let the kids get away with using “shyness” as an excuse. By definition shyness is simply the degree to which you cannot communicate with other people, i.e. the less shy you are the broader the range of people you feel comfortable with. Being a 100 kg, glasses wearing kid when I was at school myself, I know that being shy helps no-one and in the English classroom, especially, it’s something to be really worked on and never to be used as an excuse!
Anyway, I started the show, and after Akita the other week, instead of a big entry with all the groovy music I started off nice and slow and chatty, and then intended to build things up. Ah, that didn’t work did it!! These kids were indeed “shy”. Well not so much shy, they certainly could do all the basic English, but they just didn’t have the confidence!! The first rule of Genki English and the main part of the show is getting the kids to think “Dekriru, dekiru, dekiru – I can do it!”, and usually when I ask the kids if they can try 3 hours worth of lessons in one hour, there’s an even mix between kids who say “oh no” and “yes!”. But today everyone was a deadpan “oh no”. Now I wish I’d started with the big music!!
Even rock, paper, scissors didn’t get them going that much ( usually I have to call in crowd control for that song!). If this was a normal lesson I would have stopped things, forgot about teaching anything new and just worked through confidence building techniques because that’s really what they need. But in a show format, that’s not something I can easily do! So then I figured that they might just be bored with the basic level stuff and also the gym was pretty freezing, so getting them moving in a game might help things along! So I did “How old are you?“, and the jumps got them a little genkier, then we did mingle to practise “How old are you?”. The were smiling by this point, and had the English no problem, but they still didn’t have the “Yes! I can do it!” fire in their eyes. So after racking my brain as to what to do to finish on a high note, I figured on the genkiest song “Where are you going?” and that just about managed to do the trick.
So that was really hard work!! But in the end they did end up realising how good they can be when they got over the shyness!
Then afterwards it was the teachers’ workshop, and I could see where the kids get it from!!! Mind you I guess they were expecting a traditional Japanese workshop. I had been asked to do lots of songs and games, but doing those is meaningless without addressing the confidence issues underneath. So most of the 2 hours was spent going through the teachers questions, helping them out and basically letting them see that English isn’t quantum mechanics or open heart surgery, it’s simply a foreign language that millions of people speak everyday.
It’s not like climbing Mt Fuji. Compared with the other subjects they have to teach ( e.g. moral education!) it’s simply a little hill, and thanks to Japanese “gairaigo” ( foreign words), they’ve already climbed half of it! Just like swimming, you don’t start off in the deep end, you start off in the shallow end, then you keep on adding in a a little bit more each week and before you know it you’ll be swimming freely.
The teachers here have the tools and knowledge to do English lessons, and they just need the little push and confidence to take the kids to the next level, which judging by their faces and comments at the end, they are well on their way. The stated aim of teaching English at this school is actually to get the kids better at communicating in Japanese. The theory goes that the kids feel like English has different rules, so feel freer to express themselves, which then rubs off on their daily lives and Japanese communicating skills. In most cases it does actually work, and I think today’s school can really pull it off, as the difference between the kids at the beginning and end of the show was pretty huge.
Then in evening it was out for dinner with some of the teachers, and it was great to hear what they got out of the workshop. They are all great teachers, and just like yesterday, very genki!! They’ve always worked closely with many ALTs and CIRs over the years ( both good and bad!), and it was really nice to hear one of the teachers saying that even just a couple of years ago she was terrified of anyone foreign. But after being ( forced to be! ) around ALTs, she got to know them and was so grateful that she could get over her fears and enjoy spending time with them. Now really wants to try her best to pass this on to the kids. Nice.
