Last time I came here it was a week of school visits. Of course word got round the rest of the schools, so I’m back here for another week. After quite a while of computer work, I guess it’s kind of like a holiday.

The only slight problem with it is that today was two new schools, and after doing the basic show once, it sort of got a bit boring ( for me ) as I’ve probably taught this show to about 20,000 kids already! I want to teach some of the funky new themes again!

The first one was all the school, as usual, and apart from them being very quiet ( over disciplined?) in the beginning, they were very, very good and even the sixth graders were genki at the end. So for the afternoon, which due to the schedule was only the 3rd graders, I figured I’d like to try something new.

The problem is that although you can actually do any of the Genki English themes straight away in 45 minutes, if they haven’t had a Genki English lesson before there aren’t that many themes you can do three of in 45 minutes! I did try something different with the Sports Song, but they were doing the usual Japanese thing of stopping when a word came up they didn’t know. So I had to fix that first by moving back onto sure fire songs ( mainly from CD1 + Rock, Paper, Scissors) to teach the Genki English rules of “I can do it!” and “Losing means Try Again!”. Which they did very well and we finished off with the How are you? Monster game, which was a hit as usual. They were actually really good kids, I think they just weren’t that into sports. Maybe I should have done the Bugs song instead!

It is very tough though deciding what to do in a one off lesson, especially when the teacher, by their own admission, has no intention of continuing things ( hmmm). The other day we calculated that in a given month there are maybe half a million kids learning using Genki English around the globe, and I was thinking today that is spending the afternoon teaching a one off class to 100 kids really an effective use of my time? But then checking my emails tonight and seeing the effects teachers have, then well, I guess it might not be the best use of time, but those kids aren’t going to forget it in a hurry, and even if just one of them picks up on the Genki English rules then I guess you couldn’t call it a bad days work at all. I’ll just wait till tomorrow for the second time kids to do lots of funky new stuff!

If you’d like to add to this post, have a look at the Genki English forum.