856. A post for busy teachers, if it's useful



One day teacher of English A said to teacher of English B, “With the time passing and with your commitment in your classes as the teacher you will be gaining experience, as I can see in our veteran colleagues.

You’ll be capable of providing the most suitable activities in order to facilitate that your students would gain momentum in their learning and acquiring English. You’ll have more of intuition to implement the class activities in an atmosphere of smoothness and easiness. Your students will get the most fruit from each activity.

This implies you can manage the class: the goal won’t be the students be quiet but they participate in the class. An experienced teacher knows how to dodge conflictive situations inside the class; also how to stop an activity that isn’t working and then shift into another one, or maybe that teacher will change the mode or style of the activity on the spot.

That teacher adapts his class notes – the ‘script’ - for a specific class if he sees the activity isn’t working; for example, a reading exercise will finish with the first reading, because the text is of absolutely no interest for the students.

That teacher observes the actual needs and circumstances of his students now. When planning a class or a unit he can have a quick and intuititive view of what fits his students’ needs: what is realistic and challeging at the same time, and with that specific group in mind and not other.

And all this with some sense of humor, which is the result of the love of benevolence to his students. – That said, I may have depicted a superman or superwoman, haven’t I? However, this picture might perhaps give us some clues that we can acquire little by little: each class can be a little piece of learning the job of a teacher of languages.” / Photo from: army mil. an immersion class of german for US students    

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