Today I was scheduled to have a workshop from 1 o’clock, but after chatting with the teacher last night we decided I’d go to the school and have a look at the stuff they were doing in the morning. The teacher there is really good and has some cool ideas and materials. They base their curriculum on NHK’s Eigorian, which I haven’t found to have such good results in the past as many teachers just use it for input but don’t get the kids speaking. But here they use the video and the Eigorian website for one hour, then in the following lesson they do games and activities to actually use the English from the programme. This seemed to work quite well and I went through a few games with the teacher who seemed very happy!

Then in the afternoon it was the seminar. I thought that went well, there was this school plus the one next door, and they were asking quite a few questions, but there was certainly a difference in attitude between the two schools. Usually in these Summer workshops I’ve been doing a long warm up with How are you, my self intro, Q&A, the official guidelines, curriculum, lesson planning, how old are you?, mingle, Where are you going?, goal setting and the war speech. But they were quite good today so I also had time for the Harry Potter game – which they nailed! I thought it went great, but when I went back to the head teachers office the first thing he said was “Yes but of course we Japanese people are unable to learn English” – oh my goodness, had this guy not listened to anything that I had said over the last 3 hours??! Usually with this type of head teacher I know in advance from the initial chat we have and so can usually step things up in the seminar to counter it, but I hadn’t met him before so didn’t know he was one of these teachers! So he got a very quick response telling him he was completely wrong. When I came to look back at the workshop it was his teachers that were the ones who sat back doing nothing, and the ones from the other school that were really into things. As usual the rule applies, “good kouchou = good school” “bad kouchou=bad school”!!

But although the teachers who I chatted with today will have this to deal with they are really good and trying really hard so I think they’ll do well.

Tonight it was the Okayama firework festival, which would have been good to check out, but I was hot and sweaty so took the early shinkansen back to Fukuoka.