I caught up with Joel Bacha ( the Teacher & Kids author ) this afternoon. We haven’t seen each other for a while and it was good to catch up. Joel has just finished his MA in development, and has spent the last year in Bangladesh, Thailand and Bolivia. Which is of course all tied up with one of the main aims of Genki English; to provide free materials via the internet to teachers in developing countries who would never be able to afford such materials.

I’ve been wanting to make the website in Thai for ages now, so that the teaches who attend my workshops can get all the info for free, but it’s always been tricky to set up things like links and navigation as I can’t read Thai! But today we came up with the idea of having a simple pdf downloadable book. That would be easy to set up on the site, and although teachers wouldn’t be able to print them themselves ( in the areas I’m talking about they don’t have computers never mind internet), the prefectural training people could, and then teachers could copy these during workshops. Joel also suggested doing them in Spanish, for the South American market. Right, I need to get to work on that!

It is good being able to zoom out and get to the big picture again, rather than worrying about CD sales or workshop attendance figures. Those things are of course necessary, the “how” of what I do, but it’s the “why” that’s important, and that’s trying to make a difference in the World’s schools. Because these ideas really do work, we just need to get them out there!

There was also a really good NHK special on today about Japan’s population problem. First of all they had a load of kids figuring out what happens when population growth rates are either above 2 or below 2. The kids were shocked to find out that if it is 1.5 then eventually the population becomes zero. So then they were asked “So what do you think Japan’s growth rate is?” and they were again shocked to find it was only 1.29! So that by the year 3300 the Japan population would cease to exist! The cool bit was then they started talking about why, showing that in Denmark fathers help out around the house, but in Japan fathers only do 3% of household chores ( the rest of the time sleeping, drinking or doing karaoke – wow NHK admitting that!), so that women feel they can’t have more kids as it’s too much work to do alone! Plus that in Japan one child costs around 80,000 yen per month to educate, which over 12 years is 1000 man yen, a number that the kids couldn’t even visualise! So they started saying that for the Japanese race to survive fathers have to spend less time working and more time at home. Now that is something you would have never heard 5 years ago! No mention of why America doesn’t have the same problem ( because they accept immigrants), but this is one huge step for Japan to officially admit!