Today was another gig for the bookstore Maruzen. Recently these bookstore events haven’t been quite as good as they should, but the boss of the store is a cool guy so I offered to present, and as it happened it was completely booked up with people being turned away!

So I was expecting a top notch bunch of teachers who were confident in what they do and could handle some of the higher level games and songs. Unlike school workshops this is a sales presentation, where we have to sell things to pay for everything, so I decided to try out the “6 questions” sales approach. Basically this means you ask people 6 questions to which the answer is “yes”, and then they always answer yes to the 7th question, which would be something like “You’ll take the Superpack and Picture Card Pack?”. And what happens, I didn’t get past question 3!!! Which I wouldn’t mind, but question 3 was “So you all want your students to get really good at English, yeah?” and half the teachers went “Well, not really, I’m not really bothered!”. Woh!!! Just a minute! What job are you being paid to do????? So that was pretty much down hill from there! They did the songs and had a good time, but a lot of the “teachers” weren’t that interested in improving their teaching, they just wanted a free “English lesson”. I even had to do the “Your students can learn to speak English” skit as many of them seemed convinced they couldn’t!

The sad thing was that there were some good teachers there, that Maruzen had gone to huge lengths to organise such a full schedule, and all the presenters put on really top workshops for really brilliant products. Robert and Mayuka were there from Macmillan (with the great Springboard readers), Alastair and Junko from ABAX ( they have great alphabet cards and a cool book of games to go with them), and Jason from Houghton Mifflin ( with an excellent series of American textbooks for higher level kids).

So I think that it’s time to call an end to these free workshops. You get what you pay for and people who expect things for free can’t be that serious about what they do. Having more time would mean I could do like I do in school workshops where I forget about selling and just do techniques and activities to help people out with things they are stuck with. I think that’s going to be the future! Let’s get serious and professional about this!

Mind you one thing that did work was letting people know that if you buy the 24,000 yen Superpack, you can download the 39,200 yen picture card pack for free!