Alastair Horne looks back at his various teaching experiences, and specifically his first ever class.
I’ll always remember the first English class I ever taught. It was October 1998, and I’d moved to Japan a few weeks earlier to take up a job as a visiting lecturer at Kyushu University in Fukuoka. My students were mostly undergraduates, though I also taught weekly classes for graduates and members of staff.
My post was part of a government programme specifically designed to get native speakers into the Japanese university classroom. And in many respects, I was the very model of a particular kind of native speaker teacher – the type for whom language teaching is a means to an end, rather than a vocation. Not only had I never taught a language class before, but I’d also had no training whatsoever. As a doctoral student at university – a literature PhD – I’d taught undergraduates, but only in small groups, and always English literature, never the English language. What little I knew of grammar, I’d picked up from learning Latin and Greek at secondary school. With a little more initiative, I might have prepared for my new job by taking a qualification – a CELTA, perhaps – but I was young and foolish and, besides, I’d been busy trying to complete my dissertation (which, to my shame, I still haven’t finished, nearly two decades on).
Thankfully, the timetable had offered me what seemed like a reasonably gentle introduction. Later in the week, I’d be teaching two Engineering classes of between 50 and 60 students – a daunting prospect. Today’s classes, though, would be half that size: a much more manageable twenty-five students, all in their second semester, and studying English as a compulsory subsidiary to their major subject.
My predecessor had assigned me a textbook – New Interchange, by the venerable Jack Richards, whom I’ve since had the pleasure of meeting while running webinars for Cambridge. I’d worked my way through the opening unit and was reasonably confident that I’d be able to teach the material.
My new colleagues – a mixture of Japanese teachers and westerners – had helpfully offered me advice. The tip I best remember – and which I’d strongly recommend to any teacher starting out today – was to get all the students to fill out little cards with their names and photos on. Those cards came in incredibly useful as the year went on, as I used them not only to identify my students, but also to record their contributions.
What I really wasn’t expecting, when I walked into the classroom, was to find that my twenty-five students possessed only five textbooks between them. (I would later learn that this was not an unusual occurrence – with no textbooks to teach from, the teacher would commonly announce to the class that their first week’s homework would be to buy the book, and the lesson would end there, with students one lesson closer to the end of a course that few would have chosen to take had it not been compulsory.)
As dutiful as I was naïve, the idea of cancelling the class never occurred to me. Instead, I ploughed on regardless, teaching what must have been a remarkably ineffective book-based lesson, with five pairs of eyes gathered round each copy.
My students may have learned very little from this abysmal start to my ELT career, but I certainly did. Most importantly, I learned the importance of having a plan B in any situation: from next semester on, I would begin each set of classes with a getting-to-know-you session that made no assumptions about coursebook possession. Not only did this avoid the risk of having to cancel the class, but it also helped build the foundations for a much better working relationship with the students, particularly when I turned the class into a question-and-answer session in which students could ask me anything they liked.
For many of my students, I was their first non-Japanese teacher, and this made me an object of interest: their curiosity to find out more about me, and about foreigners in general, proved a powerful motivation to improve their speaking skills. It also gave me the opportunity to learn more about them, and the culture I now lived alongside. Finding out their interests at the start of the semester meant too that I was much better equipped to tweak my teaching later on to find subjects that would help them engage with their learning.
My first class as an English teacher may have been a bit of a disaster in the short term, but in the longer term it made me a better teacher: I’d never walk into the classroom again without a backup plan, or with the assumption that the day’s learning would pass simply from the textbook through to the students, with minimal input from me. And over the course of the three years I would spend teaching at Kyudai, I would continue learning alongside my students.
What did you learn from your first English class as a teacher? Do you have a story you’d like to share on Cambridge Conversations? Visit the blog home page and scroll down to “Write for us” to submit your story.