Tokushima, Anan.

I often get people saying “How come when you do workshops the teachers answer your questions and actually join in? In my workshops they just sit there nodding even if they don’t understand, hate to make mistakes, they never ask questions and some of them even sleep”. Well, that’s what’s taken me 10 years to figure out, how to warm them up and get people relaxed enough to actually ask questions, and ask for help, without feeling shy or embarrassed. The only thing is that it takes a good couple of hours to get them into that state!

So in places like today, where it’s the second year, I’d ideally like to skip all that and move straight to more advanced activities. So that’s what I did, and ended up with the dead pan reactions that plague usual Japanese workshops!

It turns out that more than half of the teachers were new and hence I had to cut my losses and re-start from the beginning. That’s tiring, but fair enough. Eventually I had their attention I sat them down in pairs to write down all the problems they have at school, then we played a game to write them up on the board. As you can see most of the questions are the usual things and are easily solved.

In the “how do we teach English if we don’t speak it” part, where I usually say it doesn’t matter, just see it as learning with the kids, one of the ALTs shouted out “I don’t know what you are worried about, most junior high English teachers can’t speak English, but they teach it everyday”. The primary teachers looked around in shock, they assumed JHS teachers were all fluent! We all looked at each other thinking “if only”…

Then it was lunch, where I could chat with the teachers, which was quite nice, and then an extra session in the afternoon.

The only tough question today, and it was similar to Friday, was “We don’t feel any responsibility to teach”. Well I guess the only thing for that is for the board of education to make it compulsory for the teachers!

So that’s what we did, we sat down with the people in charge and figured out how to make it compulsory. i.e. the teachers would teach the English, then when the ALTs visited, the kids could actually practice the English. With Genki English it’s really easy to do, but of course the people in charge are always wary of committing to one particular way of doing things ( even if it is the best ; ). Luckily the people in charge are the educational research center. I suggested they take two schools and introduce GE, then another 2 schools with another system etc. etc. Then test the kids and teachers every month for half a year and compare the results. That way they should have some concrete data. They’ll also hopefully find that GE is the easiest subject to teach in elementary school!

Yesterday I had sat down with the research people who were very stressed about curricula etc. So I just kept asking them what they want in an ideal word. Then I just popped open the appropriate GE page and their jaws dropped with “this is what we’ve been searching for all year”. It’s all out there!

The ALT in town is also one of the best in the country (it’s Garry from the forum) his desk is a mad scientist’s lab filled with thousands of strange and wonderful Genki English mini cards and funky new pictures, so they really are lucky in this town, if they do decide to teach themselves they have a fully qualified trainer on hand.

One great idea that Garry did for his kids was to print out mini versions of the picture books to take home. You just set the printer settings to print several pages on one sheet. They really do look good and are a great present for the kids.

(The ten pound note is just there to show the size!)