LESSON PREPARATION
Every lesson
should be prepared beforehand. For every one hour in the classroom, expect to
spend half an hour’s preparation time. Fail to do this, and your lessons will
be disjointed, confused, and unsatisfactory. Well, that’s what the EFL trainers
would have you believe anyway. BUT. Take a look at the teaching schedule of an
average EFL teacher in Asia. Thirty-two contact hours per week. Classes ranging
from pre-literate four-year-olds (twenty of them in one class, would you
believe) to TOEFL preparation. Written assignments to mark, tests to mark,
student reports to write. And, oh yes, perhaps a little private social life
squeezed in here and there. Now let me ask you, is that teacher going to spend
another sixteen hours on lesson preparation?
Will the world be destroyed by a meteorite at ten past two tomorrow?
Will Lady Gaga admit that she really is a man? Unlikely. Bloody unlikely.
So, you will
get teachers walking into their classes without so much as a minute’s lesson
preparation. Or perhaps they’ll engage in some door-handle preparation – as they
enter the room they’re asking themselves ‘What the hell am I going to teach
them today?’
Now, here
I’m going to stick my neck out and make a bald, bold statement. A statement
which could be my downfall, and nix my chances of ever landing an EFL job again.
But nevertheless, fearless, undaunted, I’ll make it anyway. You don’t need to spend time preparing
lessons. Perhaps in your first four or five months on the job, yes. But
once you are in the swing of things, no. And your lessons won’t be the disjointed,
confused, unsatisfactory disasters that the EFL trainers predict they will be
providing you apply a couple of smart little ploys. “Ploys? Smart ploys? Wot
smart ploys?” do I hear you asking?
OK, I’ll
tell you. (I hope you’re taking notes.) First, you have in your bag a little
arsenal of handy fillers.
Photo copies
of information-exchange exercises, half-crosswords, word-searches, vocab pics, gap-fills,
blank clock-faces, etc. Now of course you don’t fill up your lesson with a
non-stop succession of these things. You teach from the book, then every
fifteen minutes or so, or when the class’s attention level starts to flag, you
haul one out.
That’s the
paper stuff. In addition, you have stored away in your head a series of
five-minute games, distractions, and fun activities which you also trot out
from time to time. You don’t need many – three or four is enough to see you
through most lessons. Our esteemed EFL trainers might dismiss these as a
cop-out, but I hold that they are essential ingredients for a successful
lesson. Two straight hours of book, book, book is the recipe for a boring class
and a bunch of bored students. You only need to watch your students to prove
that. When you introduce a fun activity you’ll see them sitting up straighter
in their chairs, smiles will appear on their faces, and the undercurrent of
murmuring in their native language will dry up. And when, five minutes later,
you return to the lesson proper, you’ll notice a heightened level of interest
and enthusiasm. Yes, regular injections of fun distractions are the way to go.
So, lesson
preparation? Yes, all very nice if you’ve got the time. But I don’t know many
teachers whose busy schedules afford them that time. Especially not if those
teachers plan to devote some time in their day to a little bit of socializing.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Buy EFL Minus the B.S. today!!! Book form or Kindle.
No comments:
Post a Comment