At the moment I work full-time at a kindy. Illegal and everything I know, I know.
Anyway I want to change jobs when my contract is up and I want to apply to work at a Buxiban.
However one of the things that worries me is lesson preparation. At my current job lesson preparation is so simple it takes less than a minute. Literally open a book of games, decide which one I am going to use, watch a DVD of how to dance around like a monkey and then I’m done.
From what I have heard in some places you need to write a formal lesson plan, prepare handouts, mark homework and prepare communication books for the kids. One guy even told me that for 1 hour of teaching he needs to spend 1 hour preparing a lesson. Is this true? If so I can easily see 14 hours of teaching time turning into 35 hours of time “on-the-job” so to speak.
Most places will expect you to turn up 30 minutes early. You may also need to grade homework/tests, which may mean you take something home or have to go in a little early. I think it depends on who you work for. Expect a lot more “prep” for the big chains. You are in a sticky situation because some jobs look great on paper but the amount of unpaid work actually makes them worse than they appear. Good luck, milkybar_kid.
I teach Oral English classes at uni, and prepare my lessons from scratch. My lessons are Powerpoint based, and I include activities like topic discussion, role playing, mock interviews, debates, advertising (create your own commercial for a product), problem solving (moral dilemmas), TV show followed by discussion/Q&A, countries and cultures around the world, “my busiest day” - draw and discuss, and speed dating.
Next semester I want to try documentaries - let them watch a couple, then off they go to make their own. Also keen to use some TV show ideas - corny as they are, they get the students babbling which is what counts. I keep my ‘talk time’ to 25% of the lesson, and theirs to about 75% - after all it’s their chance to speak some English with a cracker coordinating affairs.
Works for me!
EDIT: I generally put about four hours preparation/creation of PPT into a 90 minute lesson, which I repeat 14 times over two weeks.
For the last two weeks of the semester I’m sending the kids (19-20 years old) on a scavenger hunt - they run around like crazy finding stuff on the list, I sit with two feet on the desk - they enjoy it, I do too!
If you’re not great at pulling (quality) stuff out of a hat or if you don’t have the brainpower/English skill to look at the textbook page and come up with a lesson on the grammar exercise asap, I recommend taking time to pre-plan.
As WLLotta says, it greatly depends on your books for the most part.
But then there are some laobans (like at #1) who think quality comes from how many unpaid minutes you sit in their chair, rather than your ability to actually teach. So expect more time to pre-plan at places like those.
I pick a high-frequency structure, often a verb-object combination, sometimes combined with a quantifier of some sort. Like “ate fourteen hamburgers”. Or “rode a motorcycle for five hours.” That’s it for input days. I just ask a whole lot of questions, and we get a conversation or narrative, depending on the group.
Reading days I type up either the class story from the previous session using said structure, or make up a parallel one using the same vocab/structures and past ones. That’s it for input-by-reading days.
Character days, I grab a book and we read it together, separately, in groups, in pairs, to our shoes, to our pencils, in reader’s theatre, etc. These are books for which the students have already acquired all or very nearly all the words and structures, so this is purely for literacy.
I set a certain weekly or monthly routine for my students. The kids don’t need a schedule anymore because they generally know what they’re going to do every day that they come in.
The week focuses around a few keywords, an area of syntax, and a test on both at the end. Good students do less work, and I do not spend much time overseeing their studies. If they found a method that works for them (gets them A’s on the tests that I give), I don’t intervene, and they progress fine. That also allows me time to focus on the lagging students with gnat-like attention spans, rush job mentalities, and so forth.
I assumed that kids nowadays were like I was when I was a kid. I aimed for high scores in large part so that teachers and parents would leave me the hell alone to my drawing, video games, outdoor play, etc. They are. I have no intrinsically motivated language learners, and so I basically work out a system that appeals to their greater desires, all of which requires time spent away from me.
I teach to adults. For each lesson I have a textbook which I must (kinda) follow and a teacher’s guide with a lesson plan already provided. I look at the chapters for about 5 minutes before I go to teach.
I have been a teacher (college, university) in the states for over 10 years and used to have to spend hours preparing lectures and powerpoints, I started off doing that but then realized I did not need to. So for a 2 hours class, I prep for around 5 minutes.
