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Things I wish I had known before starting this courseBefore starting the TEFL course, I have been teaching for two years including one year of teaching children from 3 to 12 year olds in a church setting with stories from the bible. During that time, I had no knowledge of what a lesson plan is, what is included and the importance of having an objective each lesson. I just followed strictly with the course book by photocopying and creating the exact crafts according to the book. Each Sunday when I taught the students, I found that students are never interested and are constantly running around. All that time, I thought to myself it must be because they are not interested in the bible and they dont like me so thats why they are misbehaving. One year after that I went to Korea through an exchange program where I was placed in a primary school setting, teaching students from 3 to 12 years old again. Before we taught the students, we had two weeks training of how to teach students. However, when the training was over, many of the people from the exchange program realized that we have all forgotten what we have learned during that time. It was our first day teaching at school and it was disastrous! Although we have learned some games, some activities and scattered ideas of putting together a lesson plan, we were never taught in a detailed way and the different structures of lesson planning. After a year of trial and error of the different ways of lesson planning I thought I have gained full knowledge of lesson planning, classroom management, motivating the students and so on. After a year of teaching, I returned back to New Zealand and attending my lectures at the university, I thought I was fully clear of how the teacher was teaching the new information and controlling the class because I was doing the same in Korea. The main reason why I took the TEFL course was because I thought it was just a certificate all the english teachers had to obtain if they wanted to teach english anywhere around the world without considering what the course would be consisted of. When I first started the first unit, I thought to myself alright, so we are probably going to learn about the basic things of lesson planning, classroom management and something like that. However to my surprise, the course was filled with so many different topics and information in fine detail! Although I was studying online without a teacher physically guiding me through the different topics, the information was in such detail that I felt I was leaded to different topics one by one. Also the course unit was so helpful because of the different ways of practicing the different tenses and the flexibility of answers for different items. Most of all, I was able to create lesson plans and have them corrected by a tutor with comments with what works and what doesnt. As I have been lesson planning so many times and has never had anyone analyzing my lesson plan with comments with what would work well and what wouldnt work well. As I was studying, I realized the difficulties of the students might have with certain languages, with certain classroom settings and it was very effective for me as I was able to study the certificate while using the new knowledge obtained from that particular course unit into my classes I am currently teaching. After this course, I have realized the importance of teachers not only knowing how to use and create sentences with certain language structures but the ability to understand and explain the differences to the students. I have also realized the importance of the teachers ability to spot out the difference and explain in a simple and clear way for the student to understand. The readings were very helpful and different from what other course books usually advise the teachers as the readings we were given included not only the new teaching ideas or language structures but the examples of students errors and the kind of teaching ideas that were provided. If I had known that the TEFL course was not only useful as a qualification for the teachers to write on their CV but for the teacher overall I would have studied the course a lot earlier!
