Spent the morning re-mixing and re-programming versions of the songs for the Thai schools, e.g. things like the “Where are you from?” song. Then another 3 hours of workshops in the afternoon. It’s so nice having three days to do this. In Japan it’s so difficult to get even 3 hours. But those are taken up by the basic philosophy and do work well, but it’s in day 2 when we put those things to work that the teachers start getting the “aha” moments when everything fits together.
A lot of the teachers were asking how on Earth they can train primary teachers who don’t speak English and why foreign teachers can’t do the teaching. Now that’s a lot to work on! My answer ……In an ideal world every language teacher would be a native speaker with fantastic teaching skills, after all, would you go to a guitar teacher who couldn’t play the guitar? But there is a massive worldwide shortage of quality native speaker teachers ( great job prospects at the moment!), and contrary to what the teachers think, just being a native speaker isn’t enough. For example, could any Thai speaker simply walk into a Thai classroom and teach the Thai language class to the kids? Would they know what to teach? How to teach it? How to answer the kids’ questions? At the end of the day, as in many countries, it is the class teachers who are going to have to do this. So what I’ve found is the best thing to do over the years is to simply say, forget about the teacher “teaching” the kids. The teacher starts from zero, the kids start from zero and let’s learn together! “But my students will quickly become better than me” cry most teachers, “Good”, I say, “because having the students become better than you is the sign of a fantastic teacher!”. This usually gets people on board and along with the “Mistaikes are good” and “Ships in harbour catch no fish” type exercises the teachers feel a lot less scared and a lot more excited about trying new things out. Because once you take away the fear of losing face, it really is just a lot of fun!
Oh, and I also co-ordinated the worldwide release of CD volume 6!
