Had a school show this morning, and it didn’t quite go as well as it could. Well actually it was pretty bad to be honest. The thing is that it wasn’t anything big that went wrong, just lots of little things that piled up. For starters I was actually surprised that this school invited me back. It was one of the schools in the summer where some of the teachers decided not to attend my teachers workshop as I wasn’t Japanese! But the other teachers were very good, and so I figured they’d won the other teachers round. Then yesterday I got a call saying how the the 3rd and 4th graders are looking forward to the show. Now that doesn’t work! For a lesson, 3rd and 4th graders are fine, but for a “Show” I really need the 1st and 2nd graders there to genkify the other kids. Then this morning they’d changed the time to be for 2 hours, instead of one! That doesn’t work either as except for one very exceptional kindergarten in Saitama, no kids can stay that genki for over an hour. Then the sound system was in mono, but not real mono, just wired up wrong and it sounded really muffled, so I lost all the impact of the music. And I sat half an hour in the Head Teachers room waiting to be introduced, and he never even bothered to show his face!!

But anyway, they eventually got one 2nd grade class to attend, everyone piled into the gym and of course for the kids I gave it 100%.

And this is where the bad stuff started, because half the teachers just stood there looking foul faced. I asked them politely to help several times and they wouldn’t!! Not even a smile!! Talk about ungrateful, even if you don’t want to physically move, a smile is just common courtesy!! And you could just tell straight away with the kids. A few of the classes had kids where their eyes just sparkled, and were eager and excited and really got into things. These were the 2 or 3 classes with the genki teachers. The other kids just had nothing in their eyes, it was like all the lights were out as they took their lead from their teachers. Usually even the shy kids get all genki by the end of things, but these kids looked like they had been attacked by Dementors. So it was a bit fun, but it’s not going to do much for Genki English ‘s reputation in the city! Usually in these situations I address the problems in the workshop, and in most cases it works if the teachers can see things from another point of view, but here they’d already had the workshop and the bad teachers had decided not to attend. Plus I always invite parents to shows, so that they can see the teachers in action, but of course today they decided not to invite them.

It’s a big shame really as the genki teachers here are really great and really do want to try hard and asked me to help, I wish I could have done more. It must be murder for ALTs who only have these types of dead teacher, who really if they were in any other industry would be fired!

So I’ll have to get another school to do a show in before the end of the year, just to show Genki English does work!! And work with the eager teachers in the school so hopefully the parents will start asking why there is such a difference in the kids.

Then I was home by 11!! So had a bit of lunch, felt good after doing an hour of exercise, watched a bit of TV and got on with some work.