No matter how many times I do these “jissen” ( where the teachers teach ) workshops I always have a sinking feeling part way through that the teachers will never make it and we’ll end up finishing with them even more confused than where we started. But luckily every time ( so far!) we get…

Luckily I flew in to Okinawa yesterday, so avoided the big explosion at the airport this morning. This week I’m teaching a three and a half day certificated course for J-Shine. So today we had plenty of time for problem solving and Q&As. I also tried out an idea I got from the “Next Internet…

Instead of being organised by a school, today’s workshop was sponsored by the city’s Education Research Centre. Hence we had teachers from lots of different schools. We also started off with all the formalities, introductions and lots of bowing! Which worked great as everyone was ready to start moving by the time it was my…

Wow, what a difference when people pay to attend. Today’s teachers were absolutely fantastic. We had a ton of questions, tons of attention, lots of activities and a fantastic buzz at the end of the day. Activities wise we did: * Write up a list of “joys” of your job ( for the bad days),…

Tomorrow I have a full day 9000 yen workshop for private school teachers here, so today they asked me to do a paid for show for their kids. I haven’t done any of these in a long while, but we had hundreds of parents and kids attend today, which is an amazing turn out. Due…

When you do school visits, you sometimes have bad days and sometimes you have good days. To be honest today didn’t start very well as I had to spend the first 30 minutes wiring up the schools broken sound system – I can’t remember the amount of times I’ve had to do that! But then…