I was about to write here “my life is good”, but it can’t be just me, where ever I go people are having an amazing time. It’s true that the most interesting days to blog about are the ones where you never have time to write! And it’s also true that if you want something done, you give it to a busy person.

This morning I was working on more animations for the Thai versions of the songs, and by request I also wrote and recorded a new adjectives song, all with actions that should work as a nice warm up (I’ll have a version in the CD Owners Club soon).

Then the final day’s workshop for this group of teachers. One of the things I do in longer workshops is to always ask if an activity is good or bad, and why. For example I’ll do some games and leave one rule out, or “forget” to do something important in one of the songs. The idea is it keeps them on their toes and keeps them thinking of how to improve things. The other day they were saying how things were going too fast, so I started off today with the Easter Egg Hunt. I asked whether they though this song would work well in elementary school and everyone of them said “No, it’s too slow, isn’t it!”. Nice!! Of course if works well in small English classes, but in elementary school the kids usually fall asleep!

So it was back into the Genki side of things. Then explanations of why I do this and why all the background psychology is so important, it’s not so much about teaching English, it’s about giving the kids a thirst to learn and the skills to set big goals and achieve them. If I had done this on the first day, I doubt many people would have understood, but after putting everything into practise pretty much all them were in agreement, and it was good to see the Ministry people nodding as well.

Mind you on a couple of the games ( we did a modified gokiburi where of course you only get to human instead of god) some of the teachers were a little confused to say the least. One of my problems is that I always look at the people who least understand in a class. The good teachers will learn whatever, but I don’t want anyone to go away not understanding the basics. So instead of moving on to the projects and more complicated stuff, I stayed with explaining the games really thoroughly so everyone got them. I mentioned this to the British Council people and they were saying “Yeah, but I think most of them get it. Let’s test them!!”. “Errr… we can see. Look, some of them can’t do the game” I replied. So they said “Well, let’s test to see if they have at least remembered the songs and the basics of the games”. Usually my aim in workshops isn’t to have the teachers remember things, but simply to experience them ( if you just read about them you aren’t going to try them, but once you experience them you feel the adrenaline and know what it’s all about!), and I don’t expect people to remember the words or games, that’s what the website is there for, so in the future when they are teaching these lessons they can simply look and jog their memories. But anyway we tried the test. And my goodness they were so good! We had some very cool clocks to give away as prizes which helped, but after doing each song just once we were asking what the lyrics were. Without the picture cards even I forget, but they remembered them all! The thing was one person would stand up, then start going through the gestures and then remembering the words. Then when they got stuck everyone else would do the gesture and they’d remember. Wow, I have never seen that with adults before! It really works with non-kids , that’s pretty amazing! So I was pretty much dumfounded, and they even remembered all the words from the new adjectives song I wrote this morning! So to finish off we did the Thai teachers favourite song “What do you do?” and as usual they took it to a whole new choral extravagance and it just rocked. Now that is Thailand!

I was shattered. A quick shower, a dip in the pool for half an hour, then to get ready for the big teachers party!

The teachers here come from all over Thailand, from the north to the south, a distance of about two days travel. They are naturally eager to show off their regional song and dances. Each area in turn got on stage and did their thing and it was really, really cool. Of course most of them also invited me on stage to dance with them, which could have been totally embarrassing, but with these things you’ve just got to go with the flow. It was actually cool, everybody was up dancing and singing, playing the games and of course eating the fantastic food. I also had a speech to do, and they were so receptive, even the shier ones and more posh teachers from before were 110% more genki, and they loved the adults only 4th rule of Genki English – “To get good at English, drink lots of beer”.

It was lots of fun, but the best thing for me was seeing how much of the GE technique they were taking and using in their presentations. When people weren’t listening, they were doing the hand raising thing, when people were too loud they were doing the things we’d been doing this week and all the way through were shouts of “I can do it!” and “Try again!”. One guy even did a whole skit teaching Isan dialect in GE style! That really brought home to me that it’s not just what we teach, but also how we teach it that sticks with the teachers, and even the not super genki ones do take a heck of a lot in. I guess I need to be more optimistic! Yesterday afternoon I was a little worried to say the least that we weren’t going to get them all up to speed, but today there were no such worries, I’d give them all an A+.

It was also nice to be able to go and talk to everyone there. There is still a strong class system in Thailand and some people can be a little snobby it seems! But it was cool for me to chat to the posh people, then go drinking with the country teachers I’d been out eating with in the week, and just have a good time with everyone.

We eventually got thrown out, so went for some beers in the lobby, then when we got thrown out of there it was time to finish this amazing day.