I bumped into Tom Merner a few weeks ago and he told me that he had decided to put my presentation on first thing on Sunday as I was the only person who could get everyone awake!! Which upon seeing a room full of partially hung over, and generally very tired looking faces seemed to be quite a challenge!!! I also did the presentation in English today, which sort of ruled out most of my jokes. But after a bit of warming up they got a bit into it and once I’d gone through the “What’s your name?” song then everyone was smiling. It never ceases to amaze me the reaction that song gets from non-Japanese teachers! Whew, a nice sigh of relief and on with the gig. Today was a non-commercial workshop, so basically I just did stuff from the website. Mingle was good, and they loved the phonics games as homework. The funny thing with those games is that when I demo them you can’t stop part way through, you just have to go through till you’ve completed the level! And a load of other games, tricks and motivation bits about what being genki is all about. And everyone was just so great, it was fantastic. ( You can check out the rest of what we did here). Everything went really well and we finished on a massive high note, and with the room so packed there were people out in the corridor trying to get in. And afterwards a load of people came up and asked questions and stuff, which is cool!!

Then a quick spot of lunch, a few more chats with a few more people and then off to see the main “Elementary School Round Table Discussion”. Here 3 of the leading elementary school English teachers gave presentations. But it was 100% identical to the types of things we had as ALTs in 1997!!! All the great work that’s going on on the ground just isn’t getting up to the people higher up. One teacher, who actually is really passionate about Elem English, had the main thrust of her argument that it’s so terrible that there are no teaching materials for teachers to buy and they have to spend all this time making it themselves because no-one has anything! Oh dear. Then another teacher talked about elem school and then how the kids then end up hating English in Junior High. Again something we knew in 1997!! Where’s the new stuff? Where’s the future vision? But luckily afterwards there was an open discussion. And that sort of went quite well, but we still have a lot of work to do to get the word out there. After 3 hours the general consensus was that good teachers have no real problem with English teaching, and the teachers who are bad at teaching English are generally the teachers who are bad at teaching everything! And the need to have more suitable materials for JHS. My idea of the people there coming up with JHS lesson plans and sharing them in an open source way didn’t really get much support. But again the general consensus was that elem school stuff exists, but needs promoting more, and nobody has any idea what to do with JHS. And these were some of the most influential people in the field!

Then I had a meeting with David Paul. We’ve been trying to meet up all year, but have never found a good time. But today worked out and we had a great chat, about all sorts of stuff. That was cool, most of what we think is very similar and we had a great discussion about the use of writing. And also had some chats about some other stuff.

Then some more meetings and then I met up with an ALT at the pilot school in Mie. His teachers have some very strange ideas about English teaching, so he asked if he could ask me some questions and video the answers in Japanese. Of course that was no problem.

Then I headed off to the station and after running as fast as I can after a long day, I made the shinkansen with one minute to spare! A great day though and if you get the chance to visit JALT next year then I’d definitely recommend it!