Dear colleague...


Have you ever doubted your decision to become an English teacher?

Tell me, how many times have you asked yourself if this really is the right profession for you?

I can tell you that in my more than 10 years of teaching English and training English teachers, I've experienced and noticed a few recurrent sticking points:

All of these things factors can result in people leaving the profession who could, with a little guidance, be superb language teachers. But they get worn down by all these things and eventually give up. Say, do you ever feel like you're banging your head against the wall in this gig?

Why spend hours preparing lessons, bending over backwards and wondering where you're going wrong?

Spending more time doing the same thing is only going to get the same results.

 

It doesn't have to be that way!

I'll give you an example. I worked in Japan for two years, in junior high schools and elementary schools. In one of my junior high schools, I was team-teaching with a teacher who was enthusiastic, really wanted to do a good job, cared deeply about the students, and wanted to learn.

I was already an experienced teacher (CELTA, DELTA, workshops, teacher training, halfway through my MA) and she was open to a HUGE number of my ideas.

It was a small school with just one class per grade. The year I arrived, the 1st year class were fairly keen (like most 1 year classes), the second years were already waaaaaay over it, and the third years had been completely zombified.

I won't lie to you, it was (surprisingly) TOUGH work!

But, by the time I left, the only class still at the school from that set of three was the 1st year class. They were, at that time, in their 3rd year and loving English class more and more.

The grade beneath them was a VERY small class (just 6 students!) and they'd only ever been exposed to our method of team-teaching and they were one of the keenest classes I've ever seen. They – get this! – WANTED to know about the grammatical system and revised their vocab, and wrote (and rewrote) 3 or 4 original compositions per term.

And the 1st year class at the time I left… well, they were still keen because they were 1st years. I'd been teaching them for a couple of years at elementary school so they were all au fait with communicative activities and information gaps that required them to think and so on. And when I left Japan, they seemed to be rocking along nicely.

So it's not that hard to turn things around. You just need to know how to identify the problem areas and establish GOOD learning habits and positive attitudes right from the start. All you have to do is engage the students and involve them in the process rather than teaching AT them, and you'll immediately see a difference that will, over time, turn into a BIG difference!

 

Good News & Bad News

Over the years I've written and spoken extensively about what makes language teaching effective versus that which simply recycles the same old crap, only serving to confuse students even more, stupifying them beyond belief, and generally developing a fear of foreign languages – based on their experience of it being "difficult."

Teaching a language effectively is hard work, make no mistake about that! Likewise, learning a foreign language is hard work. But neither is "difficult" when you know how.

The good news is that I started this site a few years ago as a way of sharing that information with other people (like, you, I imagine, if you've read this far!); the bad news is...

 

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Best regards,