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- Teachitworld - English Language Teaching Resources
Are you an English teacher? Are you looking for interesting material for your classes? New ideas? Teachitworld.com is the Web page that will surely help you. It contains hundreds of innovative ideas and documents in English for your classes, which will...
- Post-method - The Easy Way Out?
Post: (prefix), meaning 'coming after in time, often as a rejection of or in reaction to'. Ok, so are we focused on 'post-' being a simple, temporal shift; or is this a reaction to the methods used before? Surely they're two quite...
- An Empty Teachers' Room
I went into school the other day and found the door locked and nobody around. We all have keys, so can come and go as we please, so this isn't necessarily a problem. There are four teachers, a senior teacher - me, a secretary (who works evenings only)...
- For New Teachers: Teaching Is Not A Sprint, It's A Marathon
I'm sure that this has been said somewhere else before, but I believe that it's true. I have met some new teachers who are constantly dogged by the feeling that they are not good at the craft because they have had lessons that don't...
- Ways To Increase Esl Students' Motivation
Most ESL students need more than just a burning desire to learn English to help them get through the difficult nuances, exceptions, and challenges that await them in learning English. As a teacher to adults in an IEP, I realize that most of my students...
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Do all your classes get the same attention?
I have found while doing my MA course that it is very difficult to give the same amount of effort and focus to all the different modules of the course. Currently, I am engaged in four different modules and two of them are proving to be more interesting and motivating for me than the other two, therefore I spend most of my time focusing on them.
Anyway, whilst musing on this situation, stuck inside working away on a rainy Sunday in Manchester, wishing I was watching England take on India in the cricket World Cup, it struck me that there was a comparison to be made with a teaching timetable. I don't know about anyone else, but I have always found it challenging to dedicate as much time to all my classes. Some classes get more time because I like them more, others because it's necessary to be well prepared for problems.
At the other end of the scale there are those who get less attention. Last year, for example, I had a weird, mixed, changeable group of pre-intermediate students - tweens and teens. I admit to spending less time preparing or planning anything for this group, partly due to the fact that whatever I prepared could easily be rendered useless when only two turned up, half of them came late, the three who attended the previous class were replaced by the others in the next class and also the fact that they demonstrated very little interest, apart from the younger student who was mocked for doing so. All in all, this class was 'one of those groups', that you find (I'm sure it's not just me) yourself going through the motions with. I can't say I'm proud of this and I look back on how my attitude could have hindered the development of a stronger community spirit, yet it was an amalgamation of all sorts of negative influences that created a 'perfect storm' leading to a less than positive experience for all concerned. I don't want to get into the intricacies of the situation any more here - actually, it could make for another blog post.
What I'm trying to get at is that I have always found it impossible to give as much time to every class. Some classes get more attention because they're great, others because they're so difficult it takes up more time preparing for them. Sometimes a class gets a rapidly knocked together plan just because they're last on the list. Exam classes often receive more attention, perhaps justifiably, because they have a stronger objective.
In terms of a development opportunity, I'm wondering how other teachers deal with this. I can recall being given advice in the past that planning can be done on a cyclical basis, with the class receiving more planning time one week gets less the next and things like that. Perhaps its just time-management and as an area of weakness for me I end up in this situation whereas others don't! Maybe a better medium-term plan would help, but I am not a fan of planning too far ahead, I like to be responsive rather than having a strongly mapped out future plan. Is there a balance to be struck between the two?
Do you manage to balance the time you dedicate to each class? If so, what's your method?
- Teachitworld - English Language Teaching Resources
Are you an English teacher? Are you looking for interesting material for your classes? New ideas? Teachitworld.com is the Web page that will surely help you. It contains hundreds of innovative ideas and documents in English for your classes, which will...
- Post-method - The Easy Way Out?
Post: (prefix), meaning 'coming after in time, often as a rejection of or in reaction to'. Ok, so are we focused on 'post-' being a simple, temporal shift; or is this a reaction to the methods used before? Surely they're two quite...
- An Empty Teachers' Room
I went into school the other day and found the door locked and nobody around. We all have keys, so can come and go as we please, so this isn't necessarily a problem. There are four teachers, a senior teacher - me, a secretary (who works evenings only)...
- For New Teachers: Teaching Is Not A Sprint, It's A Marathon
I'm sure that this has been said somewhere else before, but I believe that it's true. I have met some new teachers who are constantly dogged by the feeling that they are not good at the craft because they have had lessons that don't...
- Ways To Increase Esl Students' Motivation
Most ESL students need more than just a burning desire to learn English to help them get through the difficult nuances, exceptions, and challenges that await them in learning English. As a teacher to adults in an IEP, I realize that most of my students...