This morning’s school was great! Over the past couple of days I’ve been half thinking that I’ve maybe lost my touch with some of the teachers not being as genki as usual. But today there were no such worries at all and it was a fantastic workshop! It’s probably because unlike the last couple of days, today’s teachers actually have to teach English rather than just “think out teaching it”, and they were asking all sorts of stuff and wanting to go through tons of stuff. There was no need for warming up as they were ready to go right from the start! That’s what I like to see! I had a kids show at this school a couple of weeks ago and that really helped as the teachers already knew the activities work, they just wanted to learn how to do them themselves! So we got through loads more than any other school this summer, taking request left, right and center and they lapped it up. Excellent, I love teachers who are this enthusiastic. This school is going to be a pilot school from September, so it’ll be great to see how they get on.

Then in the afternoon I had to give a business presentation! As much as I’ve worked over the last few years there are still quite a few schools that don’t know about Genki English. Unfortunately I can’t afford to employ people to go out to schools and spread the word, and advertising is really expensive, so today’s meeting was a presentation to the school educational materials suppliers to all of Kyushu – including Okinawa! And they seemed really keen and totally up for introducing the materials to their schools. So if everything works out OK, I’ll be happy that I’ll get the word out to more teachers, kids will be happy that they get some genki lessons, the suppliers will be happy as they’ll get a commission on sales, and ALTs should be happy as it means it will be dead easy to get your schools to buy the Superpack and Picture Card packs for you as it’s all nice and official! ( Just think of all the laminating time you can save!)

But of course this being Japan ( well actually I think it’s the same anywhere!) the real work isn’t done during the day, it’s done at the party in the evening! So after a nice stomach full of BBQd meat, it was doing the rounds with several bottles of beer, chatting to everyone, filling up their glasses and hopefully securing a few gigs in the process. As it was Kyushu they all seemed pretty impressed that I’d been to some of the smallest town’s in their prefectures, except of course Okinawa where I’ve not been yet. But the Okinawa guy was just impressed full stop, maybe because he’d already sold two superpacks before he even knew what Genki English was!

So a really fun day!