I’m getting a bit fed up of this. I’ve known the teacher at today’s school for quite a while and she’s really nice. Initially the school refused to let her have the travel expenses for me to come, which of course isn’t a good thing. But they came up with the idea of inviting the neighbouring schools and doing everything together. Nice solution! The plan was from 10 AM till 4 PM with of course lunch in between. As this is Okayama, where the teachers have to teach on their own and are hence very motivated, I thought it would be great and we planned to do the basics workshop in the morning, getting all the problems out of the way, the move onto some more funky advanced stuff in the afternoon.

So what happens? This morning I get told there will be 20 teachers from the neighbouring schools in the morning but most of the teachers from this school will now only attend in the afternoon. No, no, that’s no good! The teacher here knows that teachers can’t just jump into an advanced workshop. Without doing all the motivation and “changing your thinking” stuff, all that would do is alienate the teachers and convince them English was not for them. That’s the total opposite of what we are supposed to do!

So basically it meant I had to do the exact same “from the beginning” workshop twice! What a right waste of time ( and my voice!), again they could have just invited me for half a day and let me free the time up for another school!

I started off the morning in a bad mood ( there was no sound system set up either!) but flipped to being genki for the teachers – it wasn’t their fault after all. We did What’s your name? in German, which sort of worked but took far too much time. I think the false reassurance of doing it in English would have been better. Then Can you kick? and all the usual questions came up. One teacher said “My 3rd graders won’t speak”. I’ve never met a 3rd class who don’t speak so I asked what she was teaching. “Months” she said. Then quickly thought about it, “ah, I see, I guess I should be teaching something they find interesting?”. Which was proved later as the 6th graders outside were dancing along when we did the Come on Soccer song!

Then in the afternoon, I got another message saying that instead of 1PM, they’d changed it to start at 1:30. This is just getting ridiculous. The compromise of 1:15 was reached. I hate having to rush. Even if you spell things out clearly and agree it in writing they still change things!

Anyway I started again doing the same “from the beginning workshop”, taking exactly the same questions that every school asks, and the same ones we had this morning. Songs wise there were a few teachers who attended both, so we did the English version of “What’s your name?” to which they were “well yes, English is a lot easier”. Plus the Sports song. The big problem was the air-con, it wasn’t working! So we had over 40 very hot, very tired, very humid and very sweaty teachers! I felt sorry for them so we did the Creepy Crawlies song, which is very slow. The conversation then started turning round to how they can learn themselves, so after the Where is the Mr Monkey? song, which got the comment of, “Ah, so that’s how you make it interesting for the kids!”, we tried the video game and the Genki Korean food game. It really worked and there were lots of “ooh, now that is very good!” they quickly realised the CD computer games as something that would help them. We also did a couple of hip hop songs and the picture books, which they liked as well, but more for themselves rather than the kids! Then we finished off very sweaty and very tired with the war speech.

So again it worked out OK-ish, the teachers got a lot out of it, but it should have been a whole lot better. How on Earth can I get schools to not say at the end of the day “Well, yes, now I think we should have done it how we planned!”.