Despite getting to sleep at 3 AM, I was quite genki this morning. I went to check out some of the seminars, which were quite good. The first was on kindergarten teaching, done by a qualified teacher who did some really cool stuff. Then I went to check the phonics one, that was so popular!! Again done by a teacher back home and the audience were coming up with some cool stuff. It’s also funny to see my ideas being borrowed by other JETs!

In the afternoon I went to the Elementary School seminar. Every year they seem to be so different, always with teachers with very strong opinions! There really could be a whole conference just for elementary school! But this time there was a big emphasis on the goals and aims of JETs at elementary schools, which was good. Mind you the presenter was encouraging people to just say “No!” if Japanese teachers asked them to do lesson plans. This maybe the aim in the long term, but on the whole JETs are the ones who come up with the best plans, and the Japanese teachers really, really want the help. But certainly working with the town to prepare a several year length curriculum is something that’s really helpful, and a lot more productive than just taking one lesson at a time.

In the past years one of the aims of me attending the conferences was to get the word out about the Genki English website. And I think I’ve succeeded, all three workshops recorded the site today, with one reprinting about half the materials in the handout and another having the web links page as “Sites other than Genki English”!!

So I guess Genki English has come of age, and now it’s a case of listening to what else JETs need to make their most of their time here!

And now it’s time for the AJET Charity Pub Crawl….. will I make my presentation at 9:15 tomorrow…