Yesterday I was wondering if doing a one off show was worth while if the teachers wouldn’t follow up on it. But my goodness, today proved beyond a shadow of a doubt how well Genki English works even if it is only once a year.
This morning’s school was one I’d visited last year. Today I walked in and the kids were as motivated as anything right from the start. “Can you do another 3 super challenging themes today?” and without any prompting they were all “Mochiron Dekiru yo!” ( “Of course we can do it!”) in the loudest, pumped up voices you could imagine. The teachers looked as shocked to see their kids so genki as I was pleasantly surprised! A quick run through “Good Morning” and without hesitation they were all shouting “Try again!”. Now that is good. And all because of a one hour show last year. So we went on with What time is it Mr Wolf?, which they did with flawless pronunciation in 10 minutes.
I did know this was a second time school and wanted to do something new in the middle. And how newer can you get than a song I wrote at 8 o’clock this morning – the Genki English World Cup Song! I’d been wanting to do this for ages, but nothing worked, then this morning the music and everything just clicked and I had a version up and ready to try with the kids. I took a lead out of Larry King’s book and told them it was new and if they liked it, next week a few thousand kids would be using it around the world, and if they didn’t like it I’d simply start again. They were so hyped up by this and sung the whole thing brilliantly and came up with some great gestures. They were just crazy to do new stuff! Honestly you have never seen a group of people just so excited and full of confidence. Finally we only had 10 minutes left so we ran through “How are you?” and the How are you monster game to show that they can’t just sing the English, they can actually use it in context and know what it means.
What a brilliant school, and great kids. Can you imagine how good these kids would be if the teachers followed up each day?
Next up was a bit down to Earth for a new school. It was the basic show and expressions of “Err… hmmm.. not sure, it’s a bit difficult!” at the start before I taught them the Genki English rules. The staff had also taken it on themselves to ignore the written instructions from the Board of Education asking them to set up the equipment. After losing my voice and having to go to hospital last year because of teachers expecting me to teach a couple of hundred kids without mics, this year we spelled everything out and said “No mics, no show”. They still ignored it! The crazy thing was they had 1,000s of dollars worth of brand new PA gear in the gym ( with cool speakers built into the front of the stage which were very nice), but had lost the wireless mics that went with them so were using a cheap portable amp instead! But work is work, so I just let them make their excuses to the BOE people ( who were not happy ) and re-wired the PA system, which turned out to sound really good at the end of the day. I did the World Cup song again and they were great, especially the 6th graders were loving in. Nice clear sound makes a big difference.
Then school lunch, then the third school of the day!!
This one was a bit weird. I came here last year and just did the 1st to 5th graders ( the teachers of the other grades didn’t want their kids to learn English). So this time it was the 3rd to 5th graders for some strange reason. The reason turned out to be that the new Head teacher hadn’t read the instructions from the BOE that said it should be all the kids! As usual afterwards they were saying “Oh, yes, we should have done the whole school!”. It is frustrating that public workers in Japan move around almost every year, well at least not staying in the same place more than 3 years, the reason, historically, is to stop people staying in one job, building up a power base and getting corrupted. But the off shoot of everyone changing is that even though the kids stay the same you have to explain things to the new staff every year. But the kids were cool, and it was the end of a long, but very good day!
The best thing though for me was seeing how much of an influence last year’s show had on the kids this morning. I have been seriously thinking of cutting out the kids events and concentrating solely on the teachers. Certainly with the workshops abroad I’ve not even considered doing stuff for kids. But you know, just seeing this today really makes an impression, maybe I should just forget the teachers and make it my aim to teach every kid in Japan!
Tokyo dome anyone???
