Instead of seeing today’s school as part of the messed up 3 day workshop plan, I simply looked on it as a “from the beginning” workshop for a new school. This is another one of the Ministry Of Education’s pilot schools for this year ( are there any schools that have not been pilot schools?) and all the usual easy to answer questions came up such as curriculum, pronunciation, confidence etc. but there were some strange twists as well.

For example as part of my “English is easy” skit I start off by asking the teachers what they would do if a kid was in a swimming competition and half way through said it was too hard and they couldn’t go on. In most schools the teachers say they would cheer them on, tell them they could do it, to “Ganbare” in Japanese. Then I go on to say how strange it is that when the same kid says the same thing about English, teachers always say “Yes, it is hard isn’t it!”. Usually this gets a laugh and lots of lightbulbs going off as the teachers see that motivating the kids for English is just the same as motivating kids at sports and other subjects. But today only one teacher said he would cheer the swimming student on! The others said they would say nothing, if the kid wants to give up that’s their problem. Wow, I’ve never heard that from elementary school teachers before. Isn’t that what the role of teacher is, to introduce the skills and abilities, but also to instill the confidence and spirit to believe in themselves? Apparently not here.

But anyway, there was also a question that the kids couldn’t remember long conversations. I sort of misunderstood this at the beginning and started talking about how you have to review and add the previous time’s English into the current lessons. But what they were talking about was the school curriculum that has them forcing the kids to remember long set piece conversations for shops and restaurants. That led nicely into how to decide topics not by what teachers want taught, but by what the kids want to talk about! I read through the report of this city last night and they have 38.7% of their 6th graders hating English, and now I can understand why. ( Mind you it’s not too far off the national average!).

Anyway we went through things like the soccer theme where you go from very simple things the kids can use straight away ( e.g. kick, throw, etc.), to building them up, just like lego, to include longer things they can also use straight away ( Can you catch?, Can I play etc.). Then onto the projects.

Then there was also a curious thing at the end during the war speech, one of the teachers wasn’t making eye contact. Afterwards we had a chat and she said “But another school of thought is that instead of teaching our kids to communicate with other kids in other countries, why not just make everyone here into a good Japanese”. To which my reply was, “Well what about all those kids that have parents from different countries or cultures who might not want that?” to which the reply was “That’s who I’m talking about”. Hmmm… the teacher was quite serious and civil about this, but err…. isn’t it better to concentrate on making them good people instead?

Anyway, they are thinking about having me back for a workshop for the whole city next year, so we’ll see what happens. Then an hour’s standing on the bullet train to Kyoto and now I’m about to head out for the prep meeting for tomorrow.

Oh, and last night we were migrating the site to new servers, sorry about any disruption. And my email has also changed to a new system ( hopefully less spam), the address is still the same and I still do reply to every email, it just takes a couple of days sometimes!