JALT is the Japan Association for Language Learning. ( In Japanese 全国語学教育学会). Today is their huge conference, mainly attended by university teachers or private English school teachers. As it’s a pay-to-present event ( most people get their schools to pay for it), I wasn’t that interested.

But as most of the workshops are in English, Aleda Kraus asked me if I could do a workshop in Japanese for the elementary school teachers in Kita Kyushu City. Now that is just the sort of workshop I do like to do so said yes!

In the event though, as could have been predicted by the long weekend, there were hardly any Japanese classroom teachers there. And although half the people were involved with elementary schools, the other half weren’t. Which is a really silly situation to be in as doing an elementary school workshop is pretty useless for anyone not teaching there, and doing a workshop for private English teachers in English goes straight over the heads of ( and more importantly demotivates) the elementary school teachers. Hence you always ended falling between too stools and pleasing no-one!

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” ~ Bill Cosby

In the event it was somewhere in the middle. As there were some very genki people to help out, it sort of worked out.　　Thank you to everyone who was there for all your energy!
But then just wondering round I realised that going to Jalt isn’t for the presentations, it’s to meet up with all the people you’ve not seen over the year, and to get introduced to lots of new people. Which was really good, meeting up with the teachers is fun, and meeting up with publishers and authors is a great way to spread the GE ideas even more. So not a bad day, and a very nice evening.