Today I was invited to a school because the deputy head wanted to know why I would offer to do the Summer workshop at his school for free. Hmmm, OK, take half a day up explaining why I’m not going to charge, interesting use of time there! But I was in town anyway and was curious.

Then on the way back I stopped off in the Kinokuniya bookstore. You know with all the books around, both children’s course books ( hidden away in the foreign books section for some reason) and the thousands and thousands of adult focussed English learning books, you’d think I wouldn’t have to try anymore. There’s so much out there!

But then why do we still have the situation like this morning were the teachers were saying “Help! We don’t know what to do!”. Books may be cool, but they don’t get read. Making videos or a website makes it more visual, but even when they buy them ( price obviously isn’t the problem), they never watch them, .

What is it that Japanese teachers want?

I think workshops are the best way I’ve found so far, where you can hold hands and walk them through things, but with 10s of thousands of teachers in Japan, that’s not the most effective way. I think what we need to do is to just force all the teachers to teach English now. Then when they hit the problems in class, they’ll look for the solutions and be happy when they find them. Rather than now where the solutions are all out there, but they haven’t experienced the problems yet.

And just as I was writing this a a load of half naked people walked passed with a portable shrine on their shoulders. Never a dull place, Japan.