TL:DR Keep doing what works.
I’ve not kept a consistantly updated blog in… never. They always die after a few years. That’s fine though. Nothing lasts forever, or at least that’s what I keep telling myself whenever I hear mumble rap.
I’m using this sort of as a cloud storage for my teaching materials. I do already have a google drive and several USBs filled with stuff, but I figured, “Hey! I worked hard over the years developing these ideas and philosophies so I should share them for free with anyone.”
As far as teaching goes I really enjoy it! I hope you do as well. A lot of variables go into that though… many of which are not in your direct control. If you were like me you received a week of training before you started your job as an assistant language teacher. From what I can remember the only useful thing I heard all week was, “Smile.”
The whole week of training they kept going through these books with really shitty cheap formatting with loads of lessons. Some of those were probably really great lessons, but it was too much. I didn’t know where to start and I shoved those books into a desk drawer where they still remain to this day, I assume… But it really pressured us to keep things fresh. Be a flood of new ideas of creativity with the start of each new day…
That is possibly the worst thing to do as an educator. My advice is figure out what the students enjoy and then use that repeatedly. Beat that horse until it’s unrecognizable, because as it turns out kids don’t mind doing the same thing over and over again. Really that should come as no surprise. Anyone who has played boardgames knows you don’t just play the game once and then never want to touch that game again. If you ever played Sim City you never just built one city and then instantly moved on satisfied to never build a second one. If you ever played Pokemon you never got bored after the first digital dog fight. You kept grinding that content until you caught all the damn pokemon.
Constantly introducing new games and activities will be detrimental in the long run. Explaining new rules cuts swaths out of your class time. If the students have new grammar that they have to practice, but they know the framework of the activity and lesson already, you can maximize the ammount of time they have to engage with the material. The only one and done lesson plans should be the ones that bomb. If you have a great lesson identify why it was good and cannibalize that for the rest of your career. It’s not to say you can’t come up with new stuff, but it’s better to do varying iterations of something that the kids enjoy, then confuse them every lesson with something new.
So… first post, this my first bit of advice to you, take it or leave it. I will now begin to upload worksheets and activities that have worked for me in the past. I teach mainly in junior high school, but many of these ideas could be adapted to teach all ages. If you have advice don’t keep it to yourself. If you have questions then ask.
Disclaimer… I’m using our school’s very old computers to write this blog, upload materials, and also create a lot of the worksheets. This computer is still running Windows XP. The interface sucks and sometimes it deletes large contents of what I’ve written. This post in fact originally contained a funny annecdote about my first day of school, but after multiple crashes and I’ve finally figured out how to sort of get this to work, but I am too annoyed to re-write everything I orginally had written. Maybe it’s for the best. It was kind of rambling.
ALT(er)native Teaching 