Reduce, re-use, recycle

Until I started teaching full time I never truly realised all of the work that goes on behind the scenes in order to make a (good) lesson happen. I knew that teachers needed to prepare the lessons that they were teaching and I got a little experience of it when I was on my CELTA course but when the full time work hits....it's a bit different to say the least.

I teach about 19 hours a week for my school and have a couple of private students who have lessons as and when our schedules allow. We'll call it an average of 20 hours of teachin a week. Each of those lessons needs to be prepared and planned. Preparation time for a lesson varies quite a lot depending on what material you are using. The actual structuring of the lesson takes perhaps half an hour as you figure out the stages of teaching the subject or grammar point that you're covering. This is fairly easy to break into chunks as you deal with introducing the material, getting the students to use it in positive and negative sentences (e.g. I like football/I don't like football), then move on to question forms and more independent use, perhaps in a conversational setting or game.

What can really take up your time and make the job a lot harder is the preparation of the associated teaching material. This can include creating exercises, board games, flashcards, picture cards, finding writing extracts, making sure you have the recordings ready for a listening exercise etc etc. This is where lessons can suck up your time and make you feel like you're buried in paperwork. I try to make a dent in everything on Friday so I can have the weekend off but I often have to pop into Class at least for a little bit to finalise things.

My 'friend' paperwork. How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways ;-)


Now there are very good reasons to do all of the work associated with planning lessons. It's true that you can go into a lesson with nothing more than yourself, some pens and paper/whiteboard and teach a great lesson, but it's not easy. You have to be on top of absolutely everything that can come up, be ready with great examples to teach vocabulary or clear up points, have a perfect sense of reading your students' comfort and be able to time things so you finish at the end of the lesson having nicely cleared up all of the points you taught. I've done it once or twice (as has, I'm sure, every teacher), but it's a lot more stressful than when you have things planned and ready ahead of time.

So how do you go about reducing the time you need to spend on preparing lessons to a more manageable figure, especially with a full schedule and wanting to fit some kind of social life in there?



By stealing the oft-repeated environmentally targeted slogan for use as a teacher. You save time, and sometimes your sanity, by reducing, re-using and recycling your material.

It was suggested at that start by other teachers that I will benefit a lot by recycling and re-using lesson materials. It's amazing to find out how much variety can be created by using the exact same set of materials for different levels and subjects.

Let's look at an example that I actually used in several lessons. It was a set of flashcards with pictures of people doing activities (jobs and hobbies). I used this set to teach five tenses: Present continuous (He is dancing, they are cooking etc.), Present simple (he dances, they cook), past simple and continuous ("Yesterday?" "Aha, they were dancing) and present perfect (this week they have danced three times).

Of course I varied the activities using the cards from simple memory games for the lower levels up to more complex question forming and expanded sentences for the higher levels. One game that stands out in my mind is Pexeso, or memory pairs. You have two sets of the same cards, put them face down in two groups and then the students must match pairs. It can be very simple: Turn card 1 - "He is dancing." Card 2 - "He is not dancing. He is running." to make pairs or you can scale it up for questions. One student I teach in a 1 on 1 setting played this game with me using present perfect where he had to supply the appropriate time phrases to make it work e.g. Card 1 - "He has danced twice this week already. Has this person (card 2) danced this week too?" Card 2 - "No they haven't danced, they have eaten this morning though."

Sometimes it's a bit more complicated than that but I can't deny that following the old environmental credo is very helpful for my current career. It also fits nicely into the sharing ethic of Class and you will always find teachers swapping material, lesson plans, ideas and tips in the staff room (in between running to and from lessons of course).

All the best for the holiday season.

Pete :-)

A day in the life of an EFL teacher.

Hi everyone,

I was thinking the other day that what we do as ELF teachers is quite different to what many people do for their jobs so it might be interesting to hear about what a day in my teaching life is like. So here is the story of my day on Monday. This isn't quite a typical day as I've been helping to cover for a teacher who was on holiday but it gives you a feel for what I do.

So Monday. It's a full day of teaching that started with a 7am lesson and ran through to 7.30pm.


Here we are with an early morning start. This is the view looking east on the tram line along Ružinovska. You have to love that first haze of light at 6.30am.



Herlianska is my closest stop. Thankfully I only have to go along the line for about five minutes until it reaches the final stop. The company I teach at is just a few minutes walk from the little circular track section where the trams turn around. On the cards for today is additional practise for the students on the different uses of Past Simple (PS) and Present Perfect Simple (PPS). It can be a tough subject for students and I hope they're awake enough to take it all in.




Here's my company. They make cabling systems for datacentres and it's quite interesting to hear them discuss the new things they're working on and so on. I got a good history of the company in this lesson too. We worked through an article on the history of computers that they had to correct using PS or PPS, then I made them come up with a few statements about the history of their company. They did so admirably and I ended up leaving the lesson smiling broadly, which is the kind of incentive you need when it's 8am and you've only finished one of your nine lessons.






I had to post a couple of pictures of the underside of the main highway. The company is right next to it and you end with a bizzare concrete tunnel effect. It's particularly spooky when I first arrive, it's mostly empty of cars, there is little light, winter's chill in the air and sometimes some fog.




It's about 8.15am and I'm back on the tram. I just ride a few stops back to where I get on so I can transfer to a bus that goes to Aupark, a major shopping center. Across the highway opposite to Aupark is the Digital Park, where a number of businesses reside, including Lenovo, my teaching home for the next six hours.




Here's one of the conference rooms. I taught in this room from 1pm to 4.20pm on Monday afternoon and spent the morning (9am to 12.20pm) in a conference room in the other Digital Park building complex.

Today's lesson was a soft spot for me because it was primarily produced by me. We works as a team of teachers for Lenovo but each of us takes charge of planning one of the two lessons each week, then we discuss and get ideas to flesh out the skeleton at our meeting each Friday.



We had a request from students to review the tenses in English so they can see what they know and don't know. Most of the people we work with in the company have a decent level of English but we still have to work on finding a balance so that our lower level students get lots of practice but our higher students, many of whom have lived in the UK or US, can be challenged.

I spent six hours teaching the overview of the tenses on Monday. The lesson was primarily focused on teaching how to form the different tenses and what grammar was involved in that rather than trying to teach the uses of each. It was a big enough task even to practise and drill the forms let alone trying to teach much more. I told my students that if I could teach them all of the English tenses and uses of those tenses in one hour I'd be rich since I could charge 500 Euros a day and teach fluent English to people in a week.

Still, the lesson was a nice balance. The lower level students got to really spend some time putting together the forms and using the past participles for irregular verbs, which always throw people and higher students got to argue about the other tenses and get some time on the ones they don't know. Sometimes it got quite heated as the students would refute any use of those tenses and so I'd need to give them a situation where none of the other tenses fit. That is quite a challenge when you're doing it on the spot. Thankfully, with the number of times I taught the lesson, I got the hang of it by the end.

I also learned a lot about tenses and grammar for myself, which is one of the great things about EFL teaching.



Leaving the busy office area of Lenovo. My highlight was when one of my students said as she was we were about to end the class that she had figured out the use of the Future Perfect Continuous (a very tough tense for many learners). Go ahead, said I, hoping she had picked up on what we'd discussed as a group.

"My birthday is in April," she announced.
"Ok," said I, "how old will you be?"
"The same as the last ten plus years. In May I will have been having my twenty-fifth birthday for over ten years."

Priceless :-)

It's an example you can bet I'll be stealing for when I next teach this tense.



The shorter winter nights mean I get to see Aupark all lit up.



Looking back at Lenovo from the footbridge. One of my classrooms is right behind the O in the sign and on clear days it gives a great view over the city.



After finishing at Lenovo I hopped back on the buss to Class , picked up some material I'd left there and headed off to teach my private students. I teach a husband and a wife one after the other (they are different levels) and it's a good challenge. I'm particularly happy with the wife as she has gone from someone who claimed that she couldn't speak any English to someone who can hold a good conversation, is rounding off her knowledge of the fundamentals of English and has had her confidence with the language improve tenfold.

At 7.30 I say goodbye to the couple and head back home to spend some time with my wonderful girlfriend. It was a long day but I enjoyed it.

I hope you found the tale of an EFL day entertaining to read. If not, I hope you liked the pictures. If you didn't like any of it and still made it this far, then I salute your tenacity, if not your taste ;-)

All the best,

Pete