Today was also a funny school. I was back in Fukuoka where the Board of Education basically decided to do English, but leaves it up to each school. So in today’s school the Headteacher decided she wanted to do it, but needed some help with getting the teachers willing and able to do it! So anyway I started off with the Warm Up game and got them to go one-by-one saying a command to the group. And they did miles better than most schools, with hardly a hint of hesitation! Nice. I thought about jumping to the English is easy part, but noting the mistake I made yesterday I did my self intro first. Then when we got into the questions part they were deadly silent! Japanese workshops are usually like this, but I have an arsenal or techniques to get them out of it, but they didn’t work today! Later I found out that they didn’t really have any questions as they couldn’t see the point in teaching English. Aha. Unfortunately that’s at the very end of my workshop! Maybe I should find a way to bring it to the front!

Getting to realise English is easy took a while, they were really terrified, and I guess that was because a lot of them were older. But I did work out one new line, saying that English isn’t a big mountain like Fuji san, it’s just a hill, and thanks to all the foreign words in Japanese, you’re already half way up it! That tied in with the swimming skits ( i.e. you don’t just chuck a kid in the deep end, you start off shallow and work your way to the ocean) seemed to work, but took a while!

With the workshops I’m always wanting to teach the “whys” of what I recommend ( because if it’s just games they have fun time but don’t learn anything), but I’m wondering if I should change the workshop so instead of going for the paradigm shift of showing them a different way to see the problem, I actually let them walk through it and find out for themselves. The only problem with that is it has to happen in real time, which can take a lot of hours!!

Well, that’s the end of the Summer Workshops in Japan. I’ve taught a few thousand teachers all over the country, most of them with an exceptionally great response. So I guess I could start looking at developing a new style workshop, even if it’s just to keep myself on my toes!!

But for now I’m off to Korea, I’ll see you when I get back…