I always look forward to Fukuoka events as the teachers here are probably the most genki and inventive in the country! Mind you today was in a building way out of the usual places so it was a different crowd in. It was also snowing outside! Anyway I started off with Good Morning and Easter, like yesterday, and after “This year, Next year” I decided to do a couple of different songs from CD5 just to see how they go. I tried “What do you think?” and the food song.

And it was a good job I did!! Because when I write these songs I always write them with the kids in mind, and test the ideas and timing etc. with the kids. But I hadn’t tested any of these songs on Japanese adults! And that old problem of the teachers taking 10 times longer to get an idea than the kids, raised its head and things didn’t go too well!! Now I know why yesterday went so smoothly, it was because there was a bunch of kids at the front who got everything straight away so the teachers were just copying the kids!! Today there were hardly any kids so the teachers had to think about it on their own and got a bit lost! Which is just as well, as now I know I have to slow things down a lot when explaining to the teachers, and it will also help when I come to make the teaching guides. I think one of the things is maybe music as well. It seems that Japanese adults don’t have super amounts of musical sense, and seemingly natural phrasing and melody just throws them. Japanese kids have no problem, I guess it must be all the elevator music around that does it!

On the other hand there were a few tricks I used in a couple of tracks that I wasn’t sure how people would react, but they sailed through those effortlessly!

So it wasn’t the best presentation ever, but everyone tried, and a few people did get really into it so that was cool. Over the last few months I’ve been very much in a “cyber genki English” mode, mainly talking to people who use GE via the net, but have never attended a workshop. Then today there were a lot of people who came up to me saying how they use the Superpack all the time, but had never visited the website. Which is very interesting and it would be great to be able to bring these groups together more.

Then afterwards I had a chat with a couple of very genki teachers, about lots of stuff, which was great. That’s another thing about doing Genki English back in real life, everyone is really friendly, and it’s great to just be able to chat about stuff!!

Cool. It’s great to hear how so many people get so much out of Genki English, it certainly makes all the hard work worthwhile, and I can’t wait for the new songs to hit the classrooms!