Am I past my TEFL peak?

I’ve been teaching three virtually identical classes every week for the last couple of months, something I hadn’t done since doing primary school classes in Thailand. For some reason the second attempt at teaching the lesson is always better than the first but by the third one I’m forgetting what I’m talking about halfway through my sentence, losing my page and generally switching so much onto automatic pilot that I forget where the controls are.

No suprise there- I’ve had the same thing several times over the years, and its always the second one that is the peak. The worrying thing is that the third class is the one that reminds me most of what my teaching is generally like at the moment. And so the question springs to mind- is this the point where all the reading and thinking and blogging in the world is not going to change the fact that my teaching simply isn’t going to get better. I’ve been holding off the decline for the last few years like an aged defender whose energy levels aren’t up the job anymore but whose eye for the ball and new love of the game since the pressure is off makes up for it. Sooner or later, though, the fact that you’ve done it all means your desire has gone and a move to the second division is just around the corner. And 37 and just married seems perfectly timed for the defender extended metaphor to work…

Then again, maybe I’m just a striker that has gone off song. If so, whether my off period will be Raul-length or not and whether I’ll need to just wait it out, shake up my training regime or get a transfer to get over it, only a genuis manager would know. Even more of a short supply in TEFL than in footie as far as that goes…

Or to put it in a more TEFLy way- is there a teaching Intermediate plateau?

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 1:05 pm and is filed under ELT management, Teacher training, TEFL, TESOL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.