So after last night having one or two too many shandies, I wasn’t feeling too genki this morning! But I had to get up early to get the Shinkansen down to Okayama. And they were all full! I’d forgotten it was a 3 day holiday. So I had to get a non-reserved ticket, and I did manage to get a seat, but there were so many people standing and hunting for seats that I had to stay sat down, feeling very ill, for 4 hours!!
But I made it to Okayama OK, and got myself over to the Maruzen bookstore. And when it came round to my presentation I flipped the switch and became genki ( you have to do it for the teachers!). In the “Genki English ranking of places in Japan” Okayama just about ties with Fukuoka for having the most keen teachers who are always looking to do more cool things. Today it was also a bookstore gig hence had to sell lots of things, so I thought I’d do the basic shogakkou workshop, but choose all the songs from CD5. That didn’t quite work!! The “When, when, when” song done as a warm up (instead of a lesson), didn’t really work ( as the teachers needed more time to understand the words ) and with the food song I thought I’d do the second version from n-z. But I’d only got as far as “noodles, olives, pizza” when the teachers were saying “it’s too difficult!”. Looks like I should have started with “apples, bananas and cheese!”. I figured out what the problem was though, although the Genki English fans were cool and were really into things, the new teachers hadn’t seen my workshop before so were very much in the Junior High School mode of “dissect, analyse”, which doesn’t work for this type of thing.
The frog story came in useful for this, “if you watch a frog, see how it moves, see what it does, you’ll know how it works. But if you cut it open, dissect the organs and give them funny names, all you have is a dead frog”. If I was just in this for the sales it would be so easy just to sell people things to make them happy, but it’s the education that it’s all about!
Anyway, it took a while to get through the food song, but they saw how things like “Ugli fruit” which really threw them the first time they heard it, became really natural and easy by the time they’d finished the song. Then like last week it was the balloon game and the Food Menu game, which were cool. But that only left time for one extra song, I can do it!
It was a bit different to do full lessons, with games as well as the songs, and everyone responded well, but of course it meant I didn’t have time to showcase many songs. But as it happens most of the teachers already had the Superpack, which was cool. And surprisingly the card game was really popular, all I had to do was show a teacher how to play it and they bought a handful of packs!
So not too bad, and today was sort of a “bonus” for Okayama as I have a real 2 day workshop coming up here in August which should be really, really good. They’ve given me a list of topics they’d like to do and with 80 teachers it’s a lot for a workshop style, but it should be great!
And I tell you, it’s amazing just who uses Genki English in their lessons!
Then back on the Shinkansen to Fukuoka where I start the Summer Workshops this week. And it’s peach season, so that’s my Shinkansen snack sorted out, real peaches from Momotaro’s home town of Okayama!
