Terrific tools for language teaching
I am proud to call myself a Teacher. I absolutely love my job! How many people do you know can say that about what they do? But they don’t understand us - we teachers stick together. As teachers, we spend more waking hours of time with our colleagues than with our own families; more time with other people’s children than with our own. We bring students’ books home with us nearly every day of the week.
We never “switch-off” and we’re forever spending our own hard-earned money to buy resources for our classrooms, for “our kids.” During “Report Season” our friends and family become strangers and for weeks on end, our entire living-room is filled with strategically-placed piles of marking. We laugh, we cry, we carry the burdens of our students on our shoulders… But we don’t mind because being a teacher is an honour. We know that we are responsible for not only educating but for inspiring the minds of the world’s future leaders. We work hard because we love what we do! Thankfully, most teachers share my sentiments.
But it’s not always rainbows and sparkles. Teaching presents a myriad of challenges every single day. Ensuring that we maintain an exciting and engaging curriculum for our students is one such challenge, particularly with senior-school students. When teaching in another language however, this can be an even greater challenge. How do you successfully obtain the concentration, let alone the interest, of a classroom full of students if they cannot speak or understand the language!? Well, this isn’t as difficult as one might imagine - you just need the right tools.