I’ve always kept a book for my lesson plans, in the thought that I if I ever had the chance to repeat the lesson, I could. There are some ESL teachers that can do without written notes, and some that need them. I, sadly are the ones that need notes. I’ve only ever repeated a lesson plan once. Or maybe twice. This was an old book, and there is another book that followed it. The brown book wasn’t used up, it was just getting a bit, plump. Too many photocopies of handouts. Now days my material is in electronic form, with many gigabytes of data used up in this effort.
When I put it out to stud with the other books and recycled it, it was a hefty and over-stuffed with handouts. The page corners were stained brown from water when my bag got wet. Valuable, and I cite it as a point in time when my teaching was at a certain stage. That is, without CELTA training but, trying to teach within a system that was definitely teacher centered.
Filed under: EFL, Technology | Tagged: CELTA force, Lesson planning, teacher centered teaching | 4 Comments »
Due to not having enough rice in the bowl, the chop sticks didn’t stand up straight. So, I propped them up in an A-frame.
I tried a communicative writing task last week, with some results. The students were given a strip of pictures and, they were asked “write the sub-titles” for the strip. I explained it as a movie that was missing it’s sub-titles. The results, were varied, if not entertaining. But, it did get them speaking, as a way of feeding back on their work, they read aloud their neighbours work. After a week of the same strip (though different classes) the results are consistent at both levels. The more able classes produced good output, with some of it often being funny. While the lower level classes and students produced… lesser works. Okay, I wasn’t expecting a Shakespeare sonnet, but given free writing practice, my students never failed to amuse.
