Today was a workshop for the Okayama City Education Center. I know lots of the teachers here, it’s the 7th year they’ve invited me and I was really looking forward to presenting lots of new things for them, as they are always really keen and probably the best teachers in Japan!

I’d put together a brand spanking new presentation for them going through all the new materials they’ve been asking me about, talking about the Private Schools for the Poor in India, blasting through all the new songs from CD8 and finishing off with a big Q&A session about some of the higher level problems they’re be having. All the stuff the teachers from here are really into. I was really looking forward to doing something new.

There’s always a but…

But … this year they’ve changed the system. Instead of teachers choosing to come, last year we had loads, this year one teacher from each of the 92 schools has been assigned to be in charge of the English implementation. No problem I thought, there are more good teachers here than any other city in Japan. But … just as I’m about to start they tell me that just about all the teachers were chosen almost at random by the head teachers, hardly any of them are experienced teachers and they really have no idea what they are doing. “They’re totally newbies and totally petrified of having to teach English” I was told.

Ah lovely. So instead of my nicely crafted brand new workshop they basically said I had to do my “from the beginning” workshop again, for the umpteenth time this month. If I’d have know that I’d have simply told them to play my “Basics Workshop” DVD!

But I was here and had to do the most basic of basic level stuff because these teachers seriously did not want to be here! It took them 20 minutes to get the idea that they had to do something and not just sleep, then another 20 minutes to get them to respect what I was saying, then another 20 minutes to get them relaxed enough to ask honest questions, plus a break. Then we had hardly any time left, and all the questions were the basic same things that they could have looked up anywhere. It was not fun at all!

I could have just gone with the new workshop, but last year the few new teachers got lost when I just jumped straight into activities and stuff. You, I and every kid in the world knows the CD8 is dead easy, but for your average Japanese teacher, they see it as something akin to brain surgery or rocket science.

I had a look at the reports at the end, and as I thought I got my worst evaluation ever! The newbies all gave me A’s, but the few old timers that were there gave me B’s and even C’s for not doing anything new! I know the path to failure is to try and please all the people all the time, but I just wish they had told me and I would have insisted on making two groups, one for beginners and one for experienced teachers. I should have suspected something was up when some of the really good teachers in the city said they weren’t allowed to attend. This is one place where they don’t pay my fee, they just pay travel expenses which was a deal I worked out with the guy who used to work here, today they really did take advantage of that hospitality.

I must also apologise to the ALTs, I really did want to do some good stuff for you today as well, sorry.

Okayama is also the place I champion to everyone else, I say “Look at the great teachers here, look at the really cool stuff they are doing and look how good their kids are!”. But what is the point in having so many really good, really well trained teachers if you then put total newbies in as the co-ordinators for each school? Make no wonder parents are complaining!

School roof & video letters

In the afternoon they had another workshop by a teacher who was talking about what she was doing in classes. So I stuck around to she what she would do as I thought you might appreciate some new ideas. It was actually really, really good. She was using lots of videos of the kids doing stuff. They weren’t actually doing much new English, which the teachers seemed very happy about (no effort required on their part!), but she had some really cool projects, calling them “Video Letters” which I think is a much better name. For example the kids would go to the top of their school roof, ask “What’s that?” and explain the landmarks they could see. They also did things like playing instruments (sing “I can play the ….?“) and some other really good ideas which I really should have written down.

She also showed a good activity using the picture book “The World in a Supermarket”. She gave the kids some food cards and flag cards and they had to guess which foods came from which countries. Great idea! Then she read the picture book to see if they got the right foods in the right places. Then the kids did their own version of the book showing where they get their own food from.

The only bad point was that the teacher was fluent in (accentless) English so could do such stuff. I doubt if any of the teachers today could re-do the same type of lesson, but as usual they enjoyed just being the students!

Also as usual in Japanese workshops some of the teachers were sleeping in the afternoon. Personally I don’t let teachers get away with that and make sure to change the pace of what I’m doing well before then, but here the back few rows were happily snoozing away, all paid for with our tax money of course! Then they have the cheek to turn round and say ALTs are unprofessional and I was like “Dude, you’re paid to be here and you’re sleeping”. Some aspects of Japanese culture don’t need spreading to the rest of the world!

Then one of the older ladies from the Education Center gave me a lift to the station and was apologising profusely for what happened this morning. She seemed just as upset by the new system as I was disappointed. Well, at least they know something’s wrong. And in the current transition period where no-one really knows what will happen even next year then I guess it’s sort of understandable. I just hope the really good teachers in Okayama will keep on being just as good as they have been for the last few years, even if they aren’t the ones in charge!