What to teach?

It is quite difficult to decide what to teach the students each week. It is made even more so by the fact that we all usually decide what to teach at midnight on Sunday evening, but that’s not the point. Trying to get a balance between teaching them something useful, that their normal English teacher doesn’t cover and also teaching them something fun (which their normal English teacher equally doesn’t do) is a tricky task.

I could show a movie every single lesson, nobody would ever know, the students would love me and I would be able to listen to my Ipod a lot! But I can’t do that, no matter how much I want to every Monday morning at 9.00am. So I try to teach them something interesting, yet useful, for three lessons, then show a movie every fourth lesson (I teach one lesson per week remember, to 24 classes). This week is movie week, with the movie of choice being Over the Hedge. So far, the classes that have seen in have loved it. I’m not even sure they can understand it, but they laugh at the right places, so that’s a good sign.

Last week I decided to teach them slang and cockney rhyming slang. I put about 15 examples of slang on the board, getting them to guess the meaning. They all tell me now that they are shattered all the time, which I didn’t think of at the time. As a way of checking whether they have understood the cockney rhyming slang I have taught them, I tell a little story. The ones who understand laugh (I’m not even sure its funny), the ones who don’t understand just smile at me –

“Yesterday, my friend called me on the dog and bone. He told me that Efan, the tea leaf, had been pushed down some apples and pears. She hit her loaf of bread and broke her bacon and eggs. It made me bubble bath to hear this.”

It made me laugh that’s for sure.

Heres how I organise my class for when I show a film and the second photo shows that they are actually engrossed in Over the Hedge (believe it or not!).