Today was the main event, the workshop for the city’s teachers. After all a one off show is great for the kids ( they’re not likely to forget it in a hurry), but the teachers have to follow up to make it truly worthwhile. However before that there was yet another kids show today! This time we had 200 kids from the city’s Saturday morning English club. My brief was to do a show that was a bit higher level as the kids had already studied English. But as I found out when chatting with the kids who turned up early, the difference between the kids who’d seen my normal show in school and the ones who hadn’t was pretty big. Even if the kids have done some English before, it’s the “I can do it” and “losing just means try again” points that mean they can move to the next level, without them they do the normal Japanese thing of saying “ehhhh??????” and get fed up when they lose games!

But luckily a big chunk of the kids had seen the show before so one very quick run through the Rock, Paper, Scissors song and they were all up to speed! Again as my voice was dodgy, I just used the CDs a capella mini-lessons which gave me a break from singing for a minute or two. Then next up it was straight into How old are you? ( which they nailed, including all the jumps!) so that we could do the mingle game, which led very nicely into What are you doing? and the Harry Potter game. They were flagging a bit by this time, but did well, especially considering they did it in 5 minutes compared with the recommended 20. Plus of course the Harry Potter game got them all crazy again. So then in the final 10 minutes I was quite happy to finish with something nice and simple like the “Thank you” song, but when I asked them if they wanted the last song to be easy or challenging ( always best to ask the kids), most of them wanted to take on a challenge!! OK, if they want to do it, let’s give them what they want! So in 10 minutes we did What’s the weather like? along with the Weather Clap, Clap game ( so I could check if they really had got the phrases or not) and they did it! So after 60 minutes I was well exhausted, and so were most of the kids! But then when I finished things up and left the stage they were shouting at the top of their voices for an encore!! That’s only the second time the kids have beaten me in the energy stakes. So we finished off with another round of Rock, Paper, Scissors and they were shouting out at the top of their voices. So that was a brilliant way to end this week’s kids tour!!

So a quick lunch and I got ready for the afternoon workshop. Being the first time in a prefecture it was very difficult to get teachers to attend today ( this always happens!), and a few people said they would only attend for an hour ( or not at all because they didn’t believe a foreigner could speak Japanese) . But there were over 50 people there, which for a non-compulsory Saturday afternoon workshop is pretty amazing. Just at the last minute I also got the word that NHK would be filming, and the guy looked like he had been forced to be here and wanted to get out as fast as possible. It seems the terms “seminar”, which in Japanese roughly translates as “death by boredom” and “English”, which roughly translates as “the most scariest thing ever” had made everyone very uncomfortable to be there. Which is just the type of audience I like!!! Because within minutes I managed to get them up and active and falling over themselves laughing. It took 20 minutes to get them over their fear of English and from then on it was answering their questions and solving the problems. It is always nice to see teachers looking totally stressed out, but then seeing the delight in their eyes as they see how straightforward things can be. Even the NHK reporter was killing himself with laughing! He kept looking at his watch, then packing his stuff up, then on his way out starting laughing and started his camera up again! The usual topics came up of pronunciation, what to teach, how not to be shy, how a non-English speaking Japanese teacher can do it on their own, as well as questions from parents ( always nice to see them at workshops) on how to teach at home. 3 hours was just the right length, and they really got into the activities like How are you?, Mingle, the Card Game but they were so interested in the talky bits and on how to use the software that we spent a lot of time on that. So even though my voice was completely worn out by the end, after another impassioned speech about why all this is important, it was really worthwhile.

Lately I’ve also been re-thinking about whether to continue doing the kids shows, as they take a lot of time and also run the risk of people just seeing them and thinking that’s what Genki English is, instead of realising it’s actually about helping teachers. But today there was a really big difference between teachers who’d not see the show who were in the “oh no, my students couldn’t do that” and the ones who had and were “oh yes, my kids did that no problem, what else do you have?”, so it was really good to see the show having so much value in that regard.

So after a pretty full week it was out for lots of yakiniku, at beer at last ( the rule is never to drink the day before a kids’ show!), and karaoke, eventhough my voice was so dead I couldn’t sing!