Today’s 3 and a half hour presentation was sponsored and organised by the Tottori Prefectural Education Center – quite posh people! In the morning were talks by 2 Japanese teachers who cleared up a lot of the basics, and also opened enough lines of enquiry for me to base my presentation on. So the in the afternoon it was really good, all the teachers were keen Elementary School teachers who had come from as far away as Shimane, they asked great questions and were totally into things! As we also had more time we tried a couple of “workshop” ideas where the teachers get into groups and figure things out themselves. One problem that I often see is that Japanese teachers lack imagination when doing English lessons and get really worried when things deviate from the set plans (arrgh, this activity says 3 minutes but it’s taking me 4!!). So I purposely set an imagination exercise based on the Warm Up game and they did brilliantly, coming up with cool stuff such as “Be Godzilla! Do Sumo! Ride a Water Slide! Eat hot kimchi!”. Brilliant. Afterwards was a meeting with the high ups, and they were all really keen. So it looks like Tottori may become like Okayama where Genki English is a recognised force in their elementary school teaching. They also paid us, which is quite nice. Then afterwards we popped back into VivaShiva. Last night I offered to help set up their web page, but had had a few too many beers to make any sense of the words on the computer screen! So I popped back today, set up a website and in return got a lovely free dinner!! So check out www.VivaShiva.com !! Afterwards it was an hour’s drive to our JET homestay….