Teach English in YongxiZhen - Chongqing

lesson planning My thoughts on lesson planning, going from nightmare to cooking up a gourmet lesson. I doubt that I am alone in the world of new teachers, who have had nightmares, sleepless nights, anxiety attacks and so forth, at just the thought of having to plan a lesson. ``Where do I start?`` ``How do I put the target language across in a way that the students will understand?`` ``Am I going to have enough material to fill the lesson?`` ``Am I going to run out of time?`` ``Are the students going to ?.?`` Etc. etc. etc., with a thousand other doubts and questions going through your head at a speed you never thought possible. Having spent hours in front of the computer, reading as much as I could find about lesson planning, (and to say that there is far too much information available on the net, would be a vast understatement) I finally got started with my first attempt at planning a lesson. Somewhere between four and six hours later, and probably five or six draughts later, I had something on paper that I thought looked like a lesson plan. Feeling quite proud of myself, I e-mailed it to a teacher that I know in South Africa, only to receive an e-mail the next day saying ``You can?t put this here as the students won?t understand what you are trying to say to them. This must come after this and that needs to be covered before you can do this and you need to do this and, and, and?`` So then I was thinking that that light I felt I had started to see at the end of the tunnel, was actually a speeding train heading straight towards me and that this was never going to work for me. Go find another profession to get into I thought to myself because if this is what it I had to go through to plan a sixty minute lesson, how am I ever going to find enough time to plan for two, three lessons back to back or even forbid the thought of having to plan lessons for a whole day. More doubts, sleepless nights and eventually resigning to the fact that this just wasn?t going to work for me. But then after a few really deep breaths, a very strong cup of Earl grey and some more time on the internet, I signed up for a tefl course and looking back on it, am so glad that I took that step. I was shown many points that I hadn?t thought about, which all need to be learned and accumulatively combine to enable one to successfully plan a lesson. I was logically (in afterthought) led through the process of learning about the teacher- student, student- teacher relationships, classroom management, different teaching methods, the teaching of new language. All the before mentioned needs to be learned and taken into account before jumping in and trying to plan an effective lesson. Then and only then was I shown the different types of lesson plans and the different approaches to lesson planning. Trying the different methods and getting constructive criticism and very helpful tips and advice quite quickly got me to feeling comfortable with the process of planning a lesson and to a point where I thought about the light I had seen earlier as being a train headed straight towards me was in fact correct, only now I realised that the train was going in the right direction to take me to where I wanted to be. Having become comfortable with the idea of planning a lesson for a group of students of any level, I have realised the similarity of planning a lesson to cooking a meal for guests, the hardest part is in deciding what you are going to do with the ingredients you have at your disposal. Like a meal, a lesson can be dull, boring and leave a bad taste in one?s mouth if the ingredients are uncaringly just thrown together but if some thought and care are taken in the preparation, then an enjoyable and unforgettable experience can be had by all participants. I still need to thank my tutor for all her kind, helpful words which have helped me to get through the course to where I am keen to try the tried and tested recipes (lessons) but also thinking of ways that I can add a certain special flavour to the recipe to make it an enjoyable, unforgettable experience for all involved. Ultimately putting together a cook book of unforgettable gourmet ESL recipes (lessons) I do realise that in the ESL kitchen I have just learned to turn the stove and the mixer on and off but am going to travel down the tracks on the train that was provided by this course to the distant five star gourmet kitchens of the ESL world.