Whilst yesterday’s school had all the indications of greatness, I wasn’t too sure about today. The teacher in charge was very much on the ball, but when asked for requests for the workshop the teachers came up with “What did you think of Japan before you came?”. Hmmm. OK, so they don’t really know what I do! Which is fair enough, as unlike schools of late this school does no English except for the ALT visits.
But the Head Teacher used to be the Head Teacher at a school I went to 3 years ago. So that helped a lot, and he was totally shocked at how big Genki English has got in the last couple of years!.
Plus at today’s school I broke the record for the most numbers of kids at one show, with 970 of them!!!!! Adding in teachers and the various visitors there were nearly a thousand people today. Whichever way you look at it, the chance to motivate a thousand people is a very cool thing. Unfortunately the sound system wasn’t quite up to it! But after a few goes of making the kids lose at stuff ( in order to get the “Try again!” response), they were all mega genki! Not quite as cool as yesterday, but very good and even the 6th graders were well into it!
Then the 90 minute teachers workshop. Here the teachers don’t have to teach themselves, so in the beginning they were very much in the “look, we don’t have to be here” mood. But after going through how easy it is to teach English and International Understanding, and more importantly why they have to teach it, they were all suddenly interested and the Head Teacher’s comment was “From tomorrow, this school will have changed”.
And I only just realised what that means. On the way back I was listening to a Stephen Covey audio book, and in it he talks about paradigm shifts; the way of getting some new information that completely and totally changes your point of view so much that you can’t imagine what it was like before.
He uses the story of a man on a train. The man boards the train with his kids, a big bunch of unruly kids. They are loud and obnoxious and causing havoc on the train. Mr Covey leaned over to the man and said “Excuse me, I don’t mean to intrude, but your children are causing a lot of distress here. Is there maybe something you could do?” To which the man replies “Well, I guess, sure. But the thing is we just came back from the hospital where their mother just died”. And bang, in that instant the whole situation changes. You see the kids differently. Just that one piece of information makes all the difference.
And I realised that’s what happens in these workshops. The teachers go in there seeing English as something to be feared, something they can never do, something they strongly dislike. But they walk out of there seeing how easy it can be, how they themselves can teach it well, and they see English not as an end in itself, but as a way to communicate with other people, to allow their students to see for themselves that different people from different places are still just the same people. A paradigm shift indeed. It’s something that changes schools, and lives.
