For some strange reason I was up early and working by 8 this morning! Very strange! But funnily enough at 8:30 I got a call to say that one of the cities I did a workshop for last year, and who had bought CD sets for all the schools, had recently “gappeid” ( several towns joining together) and wanted to order sets for all the new schools in the city! Cool! Can’t ask for better news than that – not only is it a big order, but it means the schools are really finding them useful!

Then at lunchtime I went to get ready for today’s school visit. Apparently the kouchou sensei was a bit scared about inviting a “real foreigner” to the school to insisted on someone from the education center also attending!! But it was cool and she was talking about how one of her teachers had seen my workshop last week and came straight into her office to invite me to present to all the teachers. She seemed very excited about it all, but then they seemed to think I was a student at uni here! All very strange!

But the seminar was cool. Actually it was probably a bit too easy, basically once I’d showed them how to use the website and then use the software to get around the fact they can’t speak English they were very happy! It’s all a case of taking the weight off the teachers shoulders and showing them how easy it is to get started!

Then afterwards they had a meeting about the ALT visit next week. I didn’t actually know about this otherwise I would have done the “working with an ALT” workshop, but the education center are wanting them to come up with lesson plans on their own. For any ALTs that complain about what their JTEs do, it’s so easy to see how it comes about, because they really have no idea and just clutch at anything they can see, and really want as much help as they can. From my presentation they got the hand of lesson planning for years 1-5, but as usual the 6th graders are the tricky ones! But the education center will actually send 2 ALTs out just to train the teachers in lesson planning, which is quite cool.

Then I had a meeting with a distributor about getting the CDs out to more places. He was well keen and it should make the CDs a lot easier to get hold of for everyone!

Then to Starbucks for a much needed Cappuccino and I did all my urgent emails. Then I was thinking “OK, time to start producing work”, and then looked at my watch, 8 PM! I’d been on the go for 12 hours and still had stuff to do! But I was well tired, so watched a bit of Coronation Street and went to bed!