First off were two of the biggest workshops of the year in the Keio Plaza hotel for re-contracting members of the Japan Exchange & Teaching Porgramme. I don’t know what it was today, whether it was the fact that I was taking things a bit more slowly ( after listening to a recording of last…

Recently I’ve been very impressed by the Macmillan Language House stuff, they got a great new readers series ( Springboard) that gets rave reviews, so I finally got the chance today to pop across to their office and see what they have. Now usually I don’t really recommend reading activities, because it takes so long,…

I caught up with Joel Bacha ( the Teacher & Kids author ) this afternoon. We haven’t seen each other for a while and it was good to catch up. Joel has just finished his MA in development, and has spent the last year in Bangladesh, Thailand and Bolivia. Which is of course all tied…

I was getting a bit worried this morning! I usually do the Tokyo Bookstore shows in the store itself. But it tends to draw such a big crowd that people from the other departments start complaining! So this time the event was in a different building. And as what probably should have been expected a…

It’s that time of year again where teachers start fighting over dates in August. Luckily things are working out quite well, and today I was invited to some great workshops that I’m very much looking forward to. Shogakkou teachers are some of the genkiest people you could possible imagine and it’s great to be able…

The Kobe JET re-contracting conference is always a high point of the year and this year was no exception. Although I was only there one day this year, the two presentations I did worked really well, and everyone was very genki. This year I had a projector so had all the main points on the…