Yesterday I was seriously thinking of cutting out the free workshops for public schools and charging for them all. The reason being that I’ve had to spend the last 3 days organising hotels and planes and visits for the upcoming Summer tour. With all the projects underway at the moment it’s just not an efficient use of my time. Ironically in Thailand and now in Hong Kong I have whole teams of people who sort everything out. So really I need an assistant to handle Japan, but this person would obviously need to be paid so I’d be effectively subsidising the free school workshops. Now I don’t mind doing this in countries where they need subsidising, but not in super rich Japan!

I initially started offering the public school workshops for free so the budget wouldn’t be a problem and any school that wanted help could ask for it. Many schools have taken advantage of this and I’ve worked with some wonderful teachers. But there are also schools like today….

This is the 3rd time I’ve visited this school. To be honest I was a little surprised when they asked me back as last year they canceled the morning part of the workshop just as I arrived. “A nice holiday for you!” they said, which would have been nice had I not just cut short a university course I was teaching to come here! But this year they, along with the school next door, invited me for a full 3 day workshop. Great, a quick review in the morning then a day and a half at one school and a day at the other where the teachers can practice teaching and really improve. So I was a little suspicious when on Monday they said “Oh, just fly up Wednesday morning”. “But there aren’t any planes that will get me in for 9 AM”. “That’s OK, we can cut the morning short”. Hmmm, well I agreed ( figuring they just wanted to save a night’s hotel fee) and as they already had had two workshops before, an hour in the morning should be enough to get up to speed. In the end it went well.

So in the afternoon I put them in groups, they chose a theme, read the lesson plan and practised and then presented the lesson to everyone else. In most schools the first time through is really bad, the second time is much, much better and when they come to do the third theme they are usually super confident and can teach anything you can throw at them. Today they were taking ages and ages. I was really worried that we were going to end the day on the down point of only having done one theme. So I double checked the finishing time and instead of the usual 4:30 or 5 it was to to be 3:30 instead! Not good. So I asked about tomorrow, and they had decided to only do it in the afternoon. Why did they need to take 2 days of my time? It’s peak time at the moment for workshops, they could have simply put everything together in one day and I could have gone to another school tomorrow. Hmmm.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. They were taking so long to teach each theme, and lackluster wasn’t the word for the total lack of enthusiasm some of them showed. I’m used to teachers not being confident, which we can work on with time, or being confused, my Japanese instructions aren’t always super clear, but this was to the point of “we don’t want to be here” type mood. After the super gratefulness showed by teachers in Thailand, or the energy showed by the teachers in Okayama the other month I was really quite shocked. So I asked them “what’s going on? Is it a case that you had to fill your training quota and instead of a boring old guy from a university you thought you’d invite me for free?” to which one teacher said … “Well, yeah”.

Full marks for honesty, but oh my goodness what cheeky beggars!!! I have a hard time fitting in all the requests for workshops, but I still took the time to fly up here, and I still strongly believe that good education isn’t just for the people who can afford private teachers but that normal elementary school teachers are so important as they give the chance of a quality education to every child regardless of income, but this type of “we don’t care” attitude is just astounding when they’ve invited me to their school. Now there were some great teachers today who tried like crazy. But there’s no way I’m going to stand there working my best for people who don’t even care about their own jobs or their own students, never mind being respectful to a visitor.

If it wasn’t for the fact that I couldn’t contact another school in time I’d go somewhere else tomorrow. I asked the head teacher whether it’s worthwhile coming back tomorrow and he said it probably is worthwhile. And the good teachers deserve a second chance so I’ll get genki, smile a lot and do my 100% best again. But if they are like today I think I’ll just film the lessons and put them on YouTube!

So I think the days of doing workshops for free are coming to an end. Things are usually worth what you pay for them, so from next year the workshops will be priced at what they are worth. Teachers who need help will still ask for it, and hopefully those that don’t care will retire early!