Deirdre Cijffers is back with some more insights for anyone considering a career in language teaching.
As I was saying last week, lots of things are lovely about teaching, but the day to day realities can sometimes be a little less so.
‘Public Speaking’
New and future teachers sometimes worry that teaching involves standing up in front of people and speaking to them for an hour. If this is you, fear not! This is public speaking or lecturing… not teaching. Managing a communicative classroom is so much more about coordination of activities, asking the right questions, leading students to the right conclusions, giving them opportunities to try, fail, and succeed, and responding to them as learners and as people that you won’t have any time left for public speaking… Phew!
Planning
All of the above requires forethought and preparation. You need to have cut-ups or handouts made for your activities. You need to work out how one activity leads to the next and what the overall balance of activity types is throughout the lesson, how much of the time you’ll rely on the course book, and how each stage of your lesson works towards achieving your overall aims. And in the beginning you also have to do a lot of research to find out the answers to language questions you think you might be asked. I won’t lie to you – in your first job, you’ll probably spend more time planning than you spend in class.
BUT (and yes, ignore the grammar rules there) there is huge value to planning AND it will be to your benefit in the long term. As you progress, you will come across and invent activities that work well for a variety of aims and you’ll get to know the language you’re teaching in much more detail, so that part won’t take so much time. For now, just think of it as enforced learning with really short deadlines! There will always be things to learn or experiment with but, with time, these will be much more in line with what you are interested in or what your students need, rather than EVERYTHING for tomorrow…
The red pen
Man, I used to hate marking! 20 IELTS essays to be marked in two days around planning and marking for 7 other classes… groan! I soon came round to it – despite the time it takes – as it is an insight into your students’ abilities that you cannot get any other way. Even if you are using digital and you get regular scores for how well your students can fill a gap, there is no substitute for marking their writing and observing them in action and in context.
Focus! If you try to mark every mistake, you can end up spending hours covering their efforts in demotivating red pen. Stick to marking what you were working on in class. You asked them to write an essay, not just to write an essay but to practise, for example, writing topic sentences, so when you’re marking focus on those – it will save you tons of time and give students feedback on the thing that is most recent in their minds. By all means, highlight the fact that they’ve made other mistakes if you want, but make them go and figure out the right way to write it!