​Introduction

This is a book about strategies and philosophies for dealing with your job.

You’re an ESL teacher, and instead of apologizing to you, I’ll offer you some advice that will make your time easier.

Some might strike you as great, others as odd and still others as undoable or simply impossible. Maybe you can’t wrap your head around it or just couldn’t possibly see yourself doing it.

Either way, these ideas will help you cope with a very difficult job, and one few can understand.

I taught ESL for 5 years in China and I know a lot of things that can help you. Most I tried myself, others are things I heard from fellow teachers. Both are presented here for you to learn from and implement.

This book is kind of a mish-mash of things, a real useful ESL teacher book that can serve multiple purposes. I’m positive it will help you, and make you a better teacher as well.

Because, really...what are you going to do?

I know you’ve been thinking this over and over...just waiting for that first day of classes, or that return to the classroom after a weekend that was way too short.

What are you going to do?

Well, if you’re reading this then I’m sure you already have a pretty good idea what you’re going to do. After all, you’ve probably found my website full of free ESL games and handouts that will help you.

– Try out the First Class Handout, which really saved my butt during my whole first week of teaching that second year in China.

– Check out the ESL Battleship handouts that are always a popular destination for most visitors to my site – about 500 a month to that article alone!

– If you want to get your whole class excited and having fun, while learning a bit of English in the process, try out the free ESL Jeopardy games.

– And don’t forget that you can find detailed explanations on how to teach ESL, all kinds of games and lesson ideas, as well as what to do when you finish your ESL career, in my nine ESL books.

There’s a lot of stuff here to help you, and I’ve got even more in my ESL Google+ group. Remember, if you’re teaching in China you might not have the best of luck using Facebook, so this group could be a real help to you.

Other than that, I think you’ll just have to get into your first class and screw up a lot.

Yeah, it doesn’t sound like that much fun, but you’ll learn pretty quickly what works and what doesn’t...and hopefully what to do about it.

But if you’d like to skip out on hope and just go right to the useful advice, read this book. Good luck!

​Part I - Theory

​That Frightful First Class

Um...ugh...alright...well...uh...um...

What are you going to do when you get in that ESL classroom for the very first time?

You can stutter and flounder about and generally come off as someone that doesn’t know what you’re doing. Oh yeah, and those young students of yours can tell if you know what you’re doing or not in about two minutes. And that means the tone you set and impression you make in that very first class is so important.

The last thing you want is for your students to walk all over you all year. I’ve talked with teachers in China that have had this happen, and they leave at the end of the year feeling frustrated with teaching and disgusted with the country. That’s if they even make it to the end of their contract.

Having a plan is therefore critical. I urge you to check out that free Introductory ESL PowerPoint Lesson that will give you a base framework to work with. Throw in your own pictures and information about your family and friends and what you like to do.

You can eat up a lot of time with something like that, and if you get it going right from the get-go your students will see that you’re in control and have an inkling of what you should be doing.

That Introductory lesson PPT isn’t going to be enough to get you through an hour of class, however, not unless you really stretch it with long bouts of talking about yourself. See, your students are going to be pretty shy for that very first class, and while they’ll whisper to each other in Chinese – or whatever their first language is – I doubt they’ll say much to you in English.

Of course there are the exceptions to the norm, such as the few outspoken students you’ll find in every class. This will usually be a boy, one that shouts out something in Chinese, and gets a good laugh for it from the rest of the class.

Ah...your first test.

What will you do? I’d ask him what his name is and tell him to repeat it in English. If he can’t, get him to repeat it in Chinese. See if you can get someone else to translate it into English.

This is one example of something you could do during that very first ESL class. You’re going to have a lot of students shouting out in their first language all throughout your year of teaching ESL. How you handle that will define whether you have a good year or a bad year.

So what are some other tips and tricks that you can do for that first class to set things onto the right path? Here’s a quick list of things that I found useful in the countless first classes I’ve had.

– Introductions: It sounds simple, but many teachers forget to do introductions. Of course talk about yourself a bit, but have other students say their name and some other stuff. I did this with smaller classes of about fifteen students. If you have fifty kids in your class it just won’t be feasible, but you could try to get them all to say what sport they like. I did that once, going around to each student during my first year of teaching, and it took about ten minutes.

– Writing: A good thing to do with your class is have them write out a few sentences or do a few gap-fills from the sentences you write on the board. These could be anything from ‘why are you learning English’ to ‘what foods don’t you like.’ Make those into sentences and let students write for a few minutes. If you’ve