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There’s Still Time to Teach Thanksgiving in Your ESL Class

11/22/2015

Are you thinking about teaching Thanksgiving this year?

It’s a lot easier if you buy my Thanksgiving ESL PowerPoint for $0.99.

I made it a year ago, based off of a PPT I used when I was a teacher.

I don’t know what happened to that old one. I was very disappointed to see it missing from my files.

Instead of moping about, however, I decided to make a new one.

You can buy it and dozens of teachers have. It has 44 slides and here are some:

You’ll find a lot more in this old Thanksgiving ESL post I wrote last year.

The PPT is good and it’s fun. Students like learning about this American holiday and your school likes it when you teach it.

Make teaching Thanksgiving easy this year – get this PPT today.

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3 Things That Helped Me Teach Better

11/6/2015

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Teaching ESL is not easy.

Teaching isn’t easy, but when you’ve got that language barrier it’s even more difficult.

So what can be done?

I taught English in China for 5 years. Here are 3 things that helped me improve as an ESL teacher.

They also helped me keep my cool. Remember, part of being a good ESL teacher is not losing it.

The other part is teaching effectively.

Here are some tips for both.

#1 Worrying About Mistakes

John flipped through the teacher book yet again. This time it took him a good ten seconds to find the answer.

“Yep, that’s what it is – past progressive.”

The students wrote it down in their notebooks…though I expected most would forget that.

Another question was called out, and again, John didn’t know the answer, or was at least unsure. He started flipping through the teacher’s book again.

I saw this when I was training teachers, watching them teach early classes.

Don’t worry about making mistakes!

You know English.

You don’t need to flip through the book all the time, you don’t need to go with all the fancy jargon.

Teach students how to talk, not how to make a grammatically correct sentence. If they can start talking and gain confidence, that grammar can come. It won’t come if they don’t start using the language.

So don’t worry about finding the right answer all the time, and don’t worry about saying “I don’t know.”

Try to move on, try to get them talking.

#2 Stopping to Check

Kristen stared down at her notebook, began to chew her thumb.

I looked around and noticed the students start to fidget, shuffle about, get bored.

Kristen was making one of the biggest mistakes I’d seen teachers make when I was training them – she was stopping to check.

Alright, alright – you can argue she was just trying to remember where she was.

That’s what she was doing, after all…staring down at her lesson plan to see what the correct answer was.

The problem is that she disrupted the class, brought things to a standstill.

Don’t slow things down so you can look at your lesson plan or figure out the right answer. Keep things moving so students don’t get bored.

#3 Getting Annoyed, or Worse, Angry

That damn Tim.

That’s the thought I had as I stared out at Tim sitting there, that smile on his face.

He always acted up, always forgot his book, and always gave me a headache in class.

One day, I’d show him.

You know what…I never did. What I did do was run up my blood pressure needlessly while causing myself undue stress.

Who the hell gives a shit what an 11-year old thinks!

You’re going to have little bastards in your classes, students that just don’t care about English.

Shrug it off – don’t get annoyed.

And please don’t get angry.

Don’t try to force them into working, or doing extra homework. Just shrug and let them sit in ignorance.

Not everyone is going to learn English. The sooner you realize this the more time you can spend on the students that do care.

Spend less time on those that don’t. Most of the time they just want attention or laughs from classmates.

Ignore them and cut them off. They’ll either get their act together or drop out of your class. If it’s public school the regular teachers will eventually talk with their parents.

Mainly, don’t lose sleep over the students that don’t want to learn. It’s not worth the anxiety.

Conclusion

I hope these ideas help you or give you a new way of looking at things.

Try to keep your cool and learn from mistakes. That’s what teaching ESL is all about.

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November Thoughts for ESL Teachers

11/3/2015

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Typical ESL Classroom in China

How’s it going?

It’s November now.

That means if you’re a new teacher you’ve been doing this for about 2 months now.

Is it everything you thought it would be?

It’s hard to know what ESL teaching will be like until you start doing it.

You really have no way to prepare for the screaming kids when you’re trying to maintain order, the silent stares when you’re asking an “easy” question, or the pure befuddlement you feel when you get no support from your school or boss.

Yeah, ESL teaching can be tough.

Well…what can you do about it?

The easiest thing is to get online and email your parents and tell them you fucked up.

Get them to buy you a plane ticket back home. It’s safe, it’s easy…you can still get out of this.

But you didn’t do that, and I doubt you will. No, you’ve been at it for 2 months now and you’re going to see it through.

So…what else can you do?

Maybe a better question is what can you not do?

You’ve already screwed the pooch countless times in class. Hey, we all make tons of mistakes – it’s how you learn.

The good thing is that you’ve learned what doesn’t work and what you never, ever want to do again.

Yeah, I’m talking about those flopped-lessons where you suddenly had a 55 minutes to kill and nothing to do.

Thankfully you know about this site so you had a jeopardy game or adventure or fun vocabulary PowerPoint to fall back on.

But can you really do that everyday, each week?

No, you can’t.

So figure out what doesn’t work and start to analyze why it didn’t work. Then start doing the same with the things that did work.

That’s a bit part of learning, whether it’s English or how the hell to teach it. You have to figure out what’s working for you and then do more of that.

I suggest getting games on my site and PowerPoints you can work lessons around.

If you have some support from your school then I’d suggest working around the book they give you…at least as much as you can.

I remember in 2009 the school wanted me to just teach the same pages that had been taught already that week. Wow, that sure as shit didn’t help me!

So find what’s working and what’s not and see if you can go from there.

I hope it helps, and don’t be afraid to “bitch” in the comments about your ESL experiences so far.

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There’s Still Time to Teach Thanksgiving in Your ESL Class

3 Things That Helped Me Teach Better

November Thoughts for ESL Teachers

Greg Strandberg

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