They say an overnight success takes ten years to make, and it certainly applies here. I’ve been working with schools here for over 6 years, and it’s only just now that the people in charge are beginning to recognise just what Genki English is.
The city has been designated by the government as a city wide education project. They have a university lecturer in charge of researching everything and they have prepared a curriculum, handbook and training. As the teachers have written a lot of the material themselves, Genki English features a lot in the videos, but due to the high ups not knowing where the teachers got the songs from, GE never gets credited in any of the lesson plans, so they had no idea what I do.They also had some strange things like changing the lyrics to the How are you? song, but using the normal version of the CD, very strange.
But anyway the teachers had 2 days of workshops and today was a 2 hour Genki Speech to get them genki and do lots of problem solving. They were great from the start and it was so nice to see all the high ups nodding, smiling and saying “ah, now I see!” when they saw the teachers’ reactions. They were a great bunch and such a pleasure to present to!
Activities wise it was What’s your name?. Halloween, Harry Potter, Mingle, What are you doing?. I’m also finding it really useful to teach things “wrong”. For example we did the Harry Potter game with the Halloween version where the kids only have to say words, which the teachers found was really boring and easy to cheat at! So then we did the What are you doing? version where the kids have to actually ask questions and you could really tell how much better it was. Similarly with the What are you doing? song, I rushed through without doing the acapella version first and jumped straight into the song. Hence everyone was totally confused and didn’t know what to do. But they really experienced how important it is to go through the song without the music first, before kicking in the CD to genkify things. And by the end they were totally geared up to start teaching straight away!
It’s so difficult to explain to people who don’t actually teach as to how Genki English helps, and when I had the planning meeting on Monday the people in charge were going through all their problems and I was saying how there were solutions to all of them, but of course they didn’t believe me! With the exception of linking in with junior high school, all the elementary school English problems all have solutions, it’s just a case of getting the word out there. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel. And there are plenty of other subjects ( such as “moral education”) that don’t have solutions yet, where that “worry time” can be much better spent. But hopefully after today a few important “sneezers” have been impressed, seen how it works, and it might help spread things on a more official level. And that has been 6 years hard work!
