I’m back in Osaka again for the 3rd time in 3 weeks! Today was a private show and workshop organised by a teacher who came to see one of the shows in June and wanted to organise one in her town. Just like the show in June, she also asked for a “Mini Genki” show for even smaller kids. I don’t really like doing shows for smaller kids, but the one last time worked OK so as long as everything was fully supervised then I agreed. And actually it worked great! The usual problem with small kids is that they lose concentration after 10 minutes and just go mad, but these were the best behaved 5 and 6 year olds I’ve ever met! We went through one of the Kids English songs, then Left & Right, some phonics songs and How are you? Even the parents really got into it. The show was planned for 30 minutes, but they were so good we went on for 45 which made the parents very happy! In fact these kids could have joined the elementary school kids for the next show.

So anyway, after a Q&A session with the parents, another popular request, it was the time of the Elementary School aged kids. And they were terrible!!! They were just sat there, dead!!! What a contrast! Even usually killer ideas like the Harry Potter game didn’t work. And to be honest I was quite worried, I had to finish on some sort of a high note…. but with what??? I eventually tried the Where are you going? song and that finally did get them genki. Splitting them into teams and competing with each other really worked! Cool. But that was hard work!!

After lunch it was the teachers workshop, the most important part of the day. Today’s teachers were mostly Japanese teachers from one of the big franchise chains and the kids were their students. And a lot of very interesting things came up. First off I asked about the kids and why they wouldn’t speak in the beginning, for a Genki English Show that is very, very rare! The teachers were saying how that always happens, whenever there is a foreigner nearby the teachers were saying how they tell the children to go and speak to the foreigner, but the kids never want to….. well I’m not surprised!!!!!! The teachers had built up this big thing in the kids heads were English they spoke in class wasn’t “real” English as they were all Japanese, but if they saw a “real” foreigner they had to speak to them, in English. The thing is that the teachers simply didn’t realise how messed up that is! For starters whatever you tell a kid to do, they won’t do it. And secondly they definitely shouldn’t be building up this big distinction between speaking English in class and something else with “real foreigners”!! It doesn’t matter who speaks which language.

I’ve seen this lots of times before, the other week in Nagoya one teacher came up to me with her daughter and said to her “Right, now go and speak with the foreigner” in a not too polite way, then when the kid started getting all shy the mother grabbed her arm, dragged her away and shouted “Now you will speak to that foreigner in English, or else!!!”. I was like… eh???? What’s going on here then!! In the end I did chat with the kid as I felt so sorry for her, but I also gave her Mother a right mouthful later!! The thing is that a lot of teachers don’t seem to thing that there’s anything wrong with this! So we had a big chat about that today and everyone was really cool about it.

Plus lots of other things came up, for example the teachers were saying that their kids won’t speak because “they are Japanese and are therefore shy” ( as if shyness is purely a Japanese trait ) and hence they have no choice but to do grammar style work. The answer to that is to make getting rid of the shyness the number one priority when planning lessons, it’s maybe the reason the kids don’t speak, but it’s not a valid excuse. The kids, and teachers, have to make sure that it’s not used as an excuse. So that nicely led into games and activities to make the kids forget any shyfulness, which all the teachers promptly did..

Then at the end it was the war speech about how we’re all really the same, and treating people differently because they have a different face isn’t really on, and as usual that got the teachers thinking about why English is more than just words and phrases.

It was mainly just things they hadn’t really thought about before, no malice or anything, just things they’d never thought about. So that was really good to help with. Afterwards there were lots more chats and I got invited back for another full day workshop next year, cool.

As today was a private show the kids and teachers paid to attend, and after doing over so much volunteer work this year it was also great to walk away with not only my travel expenses but a nice fee as well, now that’s not something that happens too often!