With all the talk recently of reforming or changing the elementary school “English” curriculum, I figured I’d better check up to make sure that there have been no changes to the Course of Study of this year. The Course of Study or “Shidou youryou” ( 小学校学習指導要 ) is the official word on what we have…

This month’s Wired magazine has a great article about how we learn by playing computer games: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/learn.html And they also have another great article on “Beijing’s global campaign to make Chinese the number one language in the world.” http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/mandarin.html Be genki,

I’ve basically spent the last week dawn to dusk programming some new software. What a difference to last week recording then taking my breaks by the pool or the beach! I also felt really good physically last week, doing 3 hours of Genki English is really good for you! Needless to say this week spending…

Well, we all know it’s really just “Monkey”. It’s great to see the new version on Japanese TV. I loved the show as a kid. Apparently the original Monkey was also in the first episode of the new series! When I was an ALT, one JTE and I re-wrote the whole second year textbook to…

Genki English reader Roger from Imakane has been a total worksheet machine over the last few weeks and I’ve just uploaded another batch of his great crosswords, dominoes and wordsearches. They are proving very popular for Junior High School as well, so if you know any teachers who teach there, be sure to pass on…

I’m actually looking forward to getting back to Japan this time. I got a load of work done in Europe, had a great time in the States and being with all the Thai teachers made me totally excited about the future. Thailand is certainly a country that is going places, the whole development around Siam…