People often ask me if I ever get tired or feel like quitting. Usually, no. This morning, oh yes. Now I know why Japan is so bad at elementary school English….
This week I’ve been invited to do two and half days of training as part of the certificated Japanese elementary school teacher programme. I have a pretty much free rein on my stuff, but this morning for the first time I got to see one of the other sessions. It was appalling.
Not only were the examples riddled with English mistakes and on topics that kids find totally irrelevant, the CDs, from a Japanese publisher, were in-the-horr-i-ble-style-that-makes-you-talk-like-a-ro-bot. Even the basic teacher training points wouldn’t get much more than a “D” on any overseas training course. Boring, irrelevant and just plain wrong. Lovely, just all the things I rail against in my workshops. At one point we even had a grammatical analysis of “Liar, Liar pants on fire”…. It’s a shame because the lecturer is such a nice lady…
Luckily I had underestimated the teachers, as in my workshop they were totally on board with my, somewhat toned down from usual, comments about how to, in my view, correctly choose what and how to teach. Rather than just talk about what makes a good curriculum, lesson or material set I used some Genki German and Genki Korean to show how it should be done and how quickly it can be done. It was really nice for me to actually teach a language to adults for a change. I think I should do that full time, I could earn a fortune.
Anyway the teachers were cool and as bright as buttons, asking all the same questions as yesterday but also requesting ways of praising kids. “I hear there’s such a thing as praising kids too much” one asked, to which my reply was “You can never praise too much. False praise is counter productive, but when someone has done something well they have a right to know”. Yesterday I was listening to Zig Ziglar’s podcast and he was talking about one of the famous music teaching systems. He said the first thing they teach is how to bow, because if you bow people always applaud. And applause is the greatest of human motivators. Needless to say I gave the teachers lots of applause today as they were great.
Then it was out for sushi and a friend showed me what she was doing with the Genki English animal picture cards. For her baby sign class she’d printed out the cards, laminated them, cut them out and stuck them on sticks so they can bob around when the kids do the sounds they make! They were really good. She was saying how much the parents and kids love the old animals cards….. just as I was thinking of changing them for the new ones!
What do you think?
