leoteaches

 Following on my ARC theory, as I was busy playing one of my favourite solitaire puzzles today, I suddenly realized how apt an analogy it is for the whole learning process.

When I first started playing this version of solitaire, I lost maybe twice as many games as I won. It is the Two Towers version, and, theoretically at least, every game is actually winnable. However, even though I had read the instructions, it was only when I began to play the game that they made sense. And even then, there were times that I could see no possible solution.

These days it's quite different, and one thing I've discovered after playing almost 2000 games is that a dead end usually happens when I'm not paying attention. And, if such occurs, the game has a handy 'take the move back' function, where you can go back to the start and try again. Being able to do this, and having seen where the problem was ( e.g. a red 2 was trapped under a pile of spades with not enough empty spaces to move them into), it is easy enough to find an alternative route.

Most games I play almost on automatic, seeing the pattern at a glance and quickly moving the cards so that I can get ace, two etc. squared away into their correct places.

Just like this, the repetition, with mistakes that we can then correct, of any activity brings us to the consolidation stage - the auto-pilot phase if you will, where driving the car, riding the bike, or speaking a second or third language just happens!

 There are some techniques that seem to offer an instant and permanent solution to classroom problems, and you can find many of them at various sites.

They all promise enthusiastic, satisfied learners in a class that is all about study and having fun with the subject. Exactly what you want for yourself and your students. right?

However, what I have learnt can best be said by paraphrasing an old proverb:

'You can engage and stimulate some of the pupils all of the time, all of the pupils some of the time, but not all of the pupils all of the time.'

This is not meant to discourage you from trying all the techniques on offer out there, but to inject a note of reality - what works today will not always work tomorrow. That is why a teacher needs an arsenal of techniques, ideas and stratagems, and needs to exhibit patience, above all else.

Patience with students who reject your beautifully crafted lesson about G-Dragon, patience with fellow teachers who insist on teaching their way and above all, patience with yourself.

From a number of surveys of students and what they think a good teacher is, I want to offer you these three things to keep in mind:

1. Students want a teacher who knows their subject - and that doesn't mean having all the answers, but sometimes searching with them for the right answer.

2. Students want teachers who are consistent and fair -  if you punish talking in class today, you have to do it tomorrow as well.

3. Students want teachers who care about them - really caring does not mean indulging their whims, but keeping them to a standard, encouraging them to achieve the best they can and being proud of even small accomplishments on their part.

Above all, have fun. A teacher who has fun creates a class that is fun. Fun is not silly, fun is enjoying what you do, being engaged by it and deriving pleasure from the tasks.

So, go have fun with all the ideas out there!

 What study methods worked for you?

What helped you study?

Remembering that all study is essentially repetition, repetition, repetition until the memory is entrenched, here are some suggestions:

Summarise and rewrite.

Make mindmaps.

Read, then read again, then read one more time, and then, read again!

Read out loud.

Make it into a rhyme or the lyric of your favourite song.

Make a poster to advertise it.

Teach it to someone else!

 A while ago Chuck Sandy and Curtis Kelly asked the question: If cultural differences lead to something in the classroom you don't agree with, when should you step in, if at all?

As you can imagine, a wide spectrum of responses was generated, and my immediate reaction was one of caution.

Caution as to what you are reacting to.

For instance, not so long ago it was quite acceptable, in fact, it was encouraged, for older boys to beat younger ones at English Public Schools. In South Africa, most universities are only now instituting measures to stop hazing as part of initiation ceremonies. The examples are numerous, but, if you are confronted by corporal punishment in the classroom, and you don't agree with it, but it does form a part of the culture, what do you do?

Similarly, if the culture demands certain religious practices as part of the classroom environment, what do you do when you don't believe or believe differently?

I believe in reacting to abuse - and it is easy to see when there is abuse taking place rather than the corporal punishment mentioned above, since that is always wrong. I also react to abuse among the students (bullying) and to practices that foster xenophobia, racism and other forms of hatred.

However, I also tend to react by trying to reason, and to promote gradual change. Revolutions are great, but the thing to remember about them is that they tend to return to the status quo as the revolve. Slow, steady and gradual growth is what we should aim for, if we do feel called upon to change minds and hearts.

Shwon below, with some discussion following, is my model for the learning process - how we go from ignorance about a subject to knowledge of the subject. It needs more research before being finalised, so this is the first draft of the idea and my musings about it.

 Model for learning – the arc from ignorance to knowledge

 

 

 

		Subject
Ignorance	Attention to explanation	Repetition	Consolidation	Knowledge

 

Stage	Role Player	Problem / hindrance	Responsibility and enabling action
Attention to explanation	Teacher	Assuming that everyone is paying attention, demanding attention by disciplinary measures, pitching explanation at the wrong level	Strategies to capture initial attention, stressing importance of attention to the process of learning, being aware of student’s prior knowledge
	Student	Boredom, lack of interest, incomprehension, fear, disruption by external factors (distraction), negative emotional response to content or cultural implications of subject	Concentration, generating interest, asking questions, ignoring distractions, addressing concerns and asking for re-assurance
Repetition	Teacher	Waste of time, outdated pedagogy, doing the student’s task during those times when repetition is taking place.	Understanding the power of drill exercises, innovative methods to enhance these, memory training exercises and games
	Student	Disinterest, lack of participation, wanting instant results, disruptive behaviour	Active participation, concentration in spite of boredom, understanding the process
Consolidation	Teacher	Knows the subject, has mastered shortcuts and strategies for integrating knowledge, lacks patience with slower understanding	Check for consolidation on the part of the students, test gaps and constantly view subject as new, stress the importance of taking risks and making mistakes in order to learn.
	Student	Fear of failure, incomprehension, impatience	Realise that experience is the best learning tool, and only comes when you make mistakes and does not indicate failure.

 

 

For too long now it has been thought that teachers should capture attention rather than pupils having to pay attention. This reduces the teacher to the status of entertainer rather than educator. It is time that students once again learn their place in the system – that of supplicant at the altar of knowledge. And for that, the price they pay is their attention. In other words, attention should not be captured, but paid.

 

Similarly, much of the current pedagological thinking about how to harness the power of the three learning styles, or multiple intelligences, or whatever jargon you prefer to use to say that people learn by seeing, hearing and doing, rests on the teacher ‘presenting’ the material, rather than the student working with the material. Even when using so-called task based material, both the teacher and the student feel that it is fine to do the task once, then move on to the next task, and too often, in a pressured curriculum, the teacher does the task for the student by giving them the answers, rather than allowing them to struggle until they have attempted the whole task, even if there was failure on their part.

 

The biggest enemy of the learning arc is impatience and fear of failure, both on the part of the teacher and of the pupil.

 

The second biggest enemy is the lack of curiosity, exacerbated when educators decide what it is that students should learn, rather than finding out what they want to learn. Added to that is the fact that the natural curiosity of children gets thwarted almost daily – parents don’t have enough time or knowledge to answer questions, teachers have a curriculum to complete etc.

 

 As a teacher, I am passionate about education.

As an individual, I am passionate about knowledge, and do all I can to enrich my personal databank by reading magazines, books, news on the Internet and in journals and newspapers, and watching informative and entertaining programs and movies that make you think.

In the light of the above, then, let me make this rather controversial statement: formal education in the mold we know presently is not for everyone.

Let me explain a little exactly what I mean.

I fully and absolutely support the idea that the opportunity to receive the best education possible should be available to all.

Please note that I said opportunity. I firmly believe that given the present emphasis on academic achievement in our education system, some will grasp that opportunity and go on to become, like me, hungry for more knowledge, workers with that knowledge and creative members of society.

However, what of the student who is not academically minded? Who is possibly a great sculptor, or painter, or bricklayer, or mechanic, or actor, or....you get the idea. The jobs that we look down on but which are essential to our modern society are often not served by the current school and university/college system.

And yet, there these kids sit - bored, rebellious, classified as 'slow' or 'underachievers' and taking up time and energy that could be better spent on those who will excel in academe. Why? Because we do not deign to teach the non-academic subjects!

Of course we need, especially in today's world, literate members of society. So, everyone, whether they like it or not, needs to be taught to read, write and figure out sums. Beyond that, wouldn't it be great it we had a teacher who was passionate about bricklaying teaching it to students who love it? Just as we can then have teachers passionate about language teaching it to students who love it.

Think about it before you decry it as utopian - is it really that unattainable?

 Speaking as a bilingual person, with Afrikaans as my mother tongue and English as my second language, I acknowledge that having a teacher translating a word or a concept is not only useful to the learner, but, at times, crucial.

However, there is a very real danger associated with this, and that is that the translations become a crutch, and one of the necessary elements for language learning is lost - that of striving to understand what is being said. 

To illustrate what I mean, think of watching a foreign language film without subtitles. Of course the finer points of dialogue are lost as you strain to make sense of phonemes that sound familiar but are put together in strange ways, or phonemes that are totally unfamiliar. Yet, I would venture, if someone asked you what the movie was about, you'd be able to give some of the storyline, purely by having watched the characters in certain settings, portraying certain emotions, and, if you watched the movie again and again, certain words would start to emerge.

If, however, you watched the same movie with subtitles, you would understand the story much better and could even follow the subtleties of the plot, yet, if someone then asked you to identify a word that may have been used a lot, you would not be able to. In fact, it would seem as if the characters had spoken English, or Korean, or Afrikaans since that would be the language you 'heard' as you watched.

Having everything translated for you simply allows your brain to repeat (and for the effect of repetition, see the previous post) the language you do know, rather than the one you are trying to learn.

Having to do the translation yourself, however, is something different, as here you start connecting concepts with each other, now adding a label to a familiar idea. Thus, for me, when I think of tree, I have several words associated with it - boom, baum, namu, tree. Especially when you are teaching yourself another language, translation is a useful tool, but even here there comes a time when you need to strive with the language, trying to make sense of it so that suddenly you have that moment of hearing 'baum' and not thinking 'tree' but seeing the thing itself, the mental picture associated with all these words.

So, teachers, once your students have a vocabulary sufficient to allow them to attempt to deduce the meaning of unfamiliar words from the context of the sentence, you do them a disservice by continuing to translate any but the most abstract concepts for them. It keeps them dependent on their first language, and unable to really 'hear' the second language they need to learn.

 Since all learning depends on repetition, one of the most crucial roles of the teacher is to make such repetition less tedious.

What do I mean by that?

Well, it is a fact that anything we learn remains in our brains as a neural path - a specific sequence of neurons firing electrical charges and attaching to other neurons. It is also a fact that the more a thought or action is repeated, the more entrenched (stronger and bigger) that path becomes, until whatever it is we are learning is so ingrained that we do not consciously think of it any more.

For instance - driving a car. The first time it seems impossible to co-ordinate the use of gas, clutch and brake pedal with gear shifts and steering, yet, if we persist, and practice, very soon we are driving along nonchalantly, some of us even going so far as to use only one hand while talking on a cellphone with the other! BTW - please don't do this!

This is true of anything we learn. By dint of repetition it sticks (!) in the mind.

But, repeating the same thing again and again is boring. It actually works against itself, by numbing the brain. The image of rows and rows of children chorusing 'two times three is six' while the teacher marches up and down the rows is the very epitome of 'bad' teaching these days. You could actually 'switch off' your brain and merely sit there mouthing along and she would not know the difference, until testing time. The students who can still do mental arithmetic after being trained like that are those that made the effort to read it (visual), hear it (audio) and say and write it (kineasthetic) many times over.

So, in today's classroom, what can you as a teacher do?

First of all you need to explain to your students how repetition will help them achieve their goal of mastering the subject being studied. Unless they understand this, they will not be impressed by drills and games designed to encourage repetition.

Secondly - try and incorporate an element of fun into the process. Games such as 'I went to market and I bought an egg, a groundnut, a toffee..' where a long list of items need to be repeated by each player help to some extent. Puzzles such as wordsearch, using the spelling words. Making up mnemonics such as 'every good boy deserves fruit' to remember the notes on a stave is great, since the student can be creative with their own mnemonic.

Lastly, do not skip of the hard work aspect to this. Just as you have to put in the hours in the gym to sculpt a good, fit body, so you have to put in the hours to sculpt a brain. Once students accept that hard work is part and parcel of the process, a lot of your classroom battles will be a thing of the past. And in order to do this, it helps if you are a student yourself, and can serve as an example to them.

 I've shared with you my thoughts so far about how to discipline, when to discipline and what to discipline.

To summarize:

How: Don't shout, hit or otherwise use anger or violence as means of enforcing discipline. Instead, use silence, explanation and isolation. As for that last, people have asked how you can isolate a tantrum thrower without getting physical. Remember that isolation can also take the form of ignoring, and if you can't get a tantrum thrower out of the classroom, take the class away from him or her. And always remember to immediately respond to positive behaviour by a welcoming smile, a touch and some attention.

When: Every time a rule is broken the consequence must be enforced. You may not feel up to it, but unless you are consistent, you will never achieve anything like self-discipline emerging.

What: Set rules and consequences about disrupting behaviour, vandalism and lack of respect, and achieving goals. Preferably set these with the class, and involve them in the process of drawing up the rules and helping to enforce them.

Finally - in a classroom where everyone feels acknowledged for their efforts, regardless of how effective those efforts are, and where there is a clear understanding of what is allowed and what not, you have a wonderful atmosphere that only needs guiding. May you all achieve that.

 On Friday a whole group of teachers went on an excursion, and one of the topics that came up was what is needed for someone to learn something.

Of course we discussed all of the things such as different intelligences and methodology of teaching and learning styles, but one thing emerged that I think is often overlooked in the modern classroom. That is the fact that in this modern world of instant entertainment, instant food and instant gratification, students and often teachers seem to expect instant results in the classroom as well.

We tend to present a thing once, and are very surprised when, the next day, our students seem to remember not the least part of what we presented. This, in spite of the fact that we, when we learn something, know from experience that it takes repetition upon repetition and lots of hard work to instill facts into the brain.

Similarly, students get frustrated if they don't 'get' something the first time, and often give up on the whole subject if it is too difficult.

Unfortunately, with the amount of information in the world growing as fast it does, we are under pressure to get students ready for their future jobs as fast as possible with as much knowledge as possible.

Just look at some of the advertisements run by educational program sellers - three weeks to speaking Korea, five weeks to master maths etc. etc. They promise magic pills and seem to say that you just have to buy their course and you'll have this subject covered. But when the material arrives, guess what? The student has to sit down with it, repeat it, work with it, struggle with it and then repeat it again before any headway is made.

If only we can make our students realize that they, and we, need to cultivate patience during the process, would our classrooms not become places of study rather than the test factories they seem to be at present?

 As promised, some more thoughts about discipline.

One of the biggest problems in discipline in the classroom is that of no rules. Unless there are clear rules of behaviour, clearly stated and understood by all the people there (and that includes the teacher), no discipline will be in that classroom.

There will be plenty of fights, especially when the teacher is not feeling so good or is tired, and things that would normally be tolerated will suddenly be a problem, but there will be no discipline.

The rules can be made by agreement, or by dictation, but either way they should be there.

My suggestions are that rules fall into three, maybe four categories:

1) Behaviour that annoys, disturbs or is threatening, or prevents others from being able to learn.
2) Failure to comply with goals and targets
3) Deliberate insult and damage to property, either own or others, and bullying.
4) Maybe - cheating on tests and exams.

The first one is usually also the one where no clear guidelines are set and where most conflict occurs. Some simple rules are these:
No talking when the teacher talks, and if you must interrupt, do so by raising your hand.
Paying attention to presentations.
Respecting the other student's right to work more slowly than you do, and allowing them to do so.
Treating others in the classroom with respect - and here you can get specific depending on the culture you are in, e.g. no throwing erasers at each other (common here in Korea).
Along with setting the rules, must be the consequences if the rule is broken. As the song from the Mikado says, make the punishment fit the crime. Ask the students for suggestions - you might be surprised at what they come up with.

The second one is usually where there are a lot of problems - homework not done? Whack across the knuckles! Will that make him/her do their homework next time? I think not.
Again, set the rules. Negotiate a fair time to allow homework to be done. In Korea, for example, a lot of the kids study for almost 16 hours a day, often being at school at 8 in the morning, then at 4.30 in the afternoon heading for the private academy where they stay until 10 at night. Expecting them to complete a homework assignment overnight is madness. Also, negotiate with them about the 'three strikes you're out' rule. In other words, three excuses in a row for homework not being done are accepted, after that there will be problems. Consequences? Again, it is always easier to give a caning than expend energy in following up, but constructive detention, where they have to then do their neglected homework, is often the best way to go.

The third one is the problem child - especially when it comes to catching vandals in the act. However, not tolerating even something as simple as a pencil mark on a desk (consequence - clean the classroom) sends a message. When someone does get caught destroying property they should pay for such property out of allowance money or be allowed to work it off.

Finally, my maybe area - cheating. I always feel that explaining to them that cheating eventually cheats themselves is the best, but simply preventing the student from completing the exam or test also works.

The final goal of any discipline should be to bring home that actions have consequences - and being beaten is not a consequence - so that the student can be guided into self-discipline.

 It is so easy for us humans to fall into the comfort zone way of thinking. You know what I mean - complaints are usually accompanied by a caveat. Things like 'well, at least we still have bread to eat', 'as long as they are trying' and 'well, it's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick!'

Karl Weick in his book, Sensemaking in Organizations (Sage Publications), talks about how, when we are overtaken by events that are new, or strange, our brain spends most of it's resources in trying to 'make sense' of these. In its simplest form, making sense is to somehow tie in what we are experiencing with our frame of reference and our existing patterns of thinking, so that we can decide what to do about it. Think about it this way - sharp teeth, big claws, running straight at us = danger! Run away or kill it!

However, one of the consequences of not having strange things happen the whole time is that the world makes sense, we know how to behave, what is expected of us and can predict, more or less, how things will happen tomorrow.

So, what does this have to do with comfort zone thinking? Well, exactly that - when the world makes sense we are, in a very real sense, in a comfort zone. It doesn't matter if the actual physical existence is hard, involving scrounging for food or working twelve hour shifts, or coping with bad leaders, as long as we know what to expect, we are in a comfort zone.

And, inside that zone, we loath to change. Change involves us having to make sense of a whole new world, new people, new job, new way of doing things. It's so much easier to just go along as we have been doing...

The astute reader will see where I'm going with this. Why learn a new language when the one I have works OK for me to get what I want and need? Why learn all this hard stuff like maths or science or...we'll never use it or need it.

Similarly, why use a new way of teaching? Or of evaluating students? This works for us.

Yet, all human progress (some say regress in how we've polluted the planet) comes from someone making sense of something new, unknown, and thought to be unknowable. We have to escape the comfort zone to grow as thinking homo sapiens.

 A comment was made recently about how Korean kids seem to 'break' by the age of 14 or 15, specifically in the context of corporal punishment. The comment and the original article can be viewed here: 
http://gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com/2009/06/corporal-punishment-in-korean-schools.html 

This issue of corporal punishment certainly answers the question my fellow Korean teachers pose about why the second grade in middle school (14 and 15) are apathetic, listless, bored and rebellious. They've been beaten to their limit and now take the only way out - what the army used to call dumb insolence. They know they will be punished no matter what, so why try or strive for any praise?

This got me thinking about how we as teachers keep control in a classroom. And we do need to keep control, since kids, a group of kids, ah heck, any group of people, tend to become louder and less in control than any individual. But, does physical punishment or the threat of such punishment work? Maybe in the short run.

First of all we need to decide what needs to be controlled. Usually it is one of three things - noise while you are trying to explain something, inattention and physical altercations.

Let's look at the most common problem, the noise, in this entry, and I'll tackle the others in future posts. 

What does not work is shouting for them to be quiet (unless you have a voice like a sergeant-major and can be heard above a gale). This only adds to the noise level and gives them license to continue, since teacher is making a noise too!

What does work? In my experience silence, my silence, is one of my most effective tools. However, it cannot be a passive silence where I'm just waiting for them to finish what it is they are doing. That just fuels the fire. It has to be an active silence. How do I achieve that? I either continue talking but at a lower and lower tone and in a softer voice. Generally that makes the students who do listen, strain to hear me, and they start quieting their fellow students, or I stop dead in the middle of a sentence and stare, fixedly and decidedly unfriendly, at the student at the heart of the trouble. It may take a minute or two, but slowly they become aware of you, of the stare, and of the silence, a richly disapproving silence, and they quiet down. Or, like with the other, their fellow students start shushing them.

Once full quiet reigns, keep the silence going just long enough to be uncomfortable, keeping eye contact with the ringleader or scapegoat, then ask for an apology. You usually get it, and the class can continue. If you don't get it, call that student to the front and give them some task to perform, such as working out a problem on the board, or reading a passage out loud, or something similar. In other words, let them step into the role of teacher with none of the privileges. Once they've completed the task, thank them (yes, thank them) and send them back to their seat.

Why thank them? Because then you have demonstrated respect, and if you show children respect, they will respect you!

 I've talked about some of the things I believe a teacher should be doing, let me now talk about the role of the language learner. 

First of all, no learning is ever passive. A recent finding about subliminal learning might seem to pave the way to learning in your sleep, but language is the one area where if, in to paraphrase a cliche, if you don't use it you lose it! What do I mean by that? In language learning (especially a second language) it is never enough to simply listen to the new language, or memorise some words, or learn the rules of grammar - you have to actively put together sentences that will convey a message to someone else, and then speak those sentences! Learning a new language is hard work.

Secondly you have to make mistakes. Experience is nothing more or less than us learning from our mistakes. And in language learning, we have to be prepared to make those mistakes, and not think people will laugh (if they do, shame on them) or will not respond. Most people take the fact that you are trying to learn to communicate with them in their language as a tremendous compliment, and will welcome your stumbling efforts.

Thirdly, you have to be prepared to repeat a thing almost ad nauseum. You have to get so sick and tired of saying 'auf wiedersehn' or 'salangahle' or 'goodbye' that it almost makes you want to give up, but if you do, those phrases become engraved on your brain, and you no longer have to think about them, you just say them.

Fourthly, while it is useful to use translation, at least initially, try to progress where the language you want to learn is the one you are using the most, even while still learning about it.

Finally, the language learner should be reading, writing and speaking the target language to the utmost of his or her capabilities, even outside the classroom. Traveling on the bus? Try reading the roadside signs if they are in your target language, or listen to conversations around you - can you pick up familiar words and phrases? Watch movies without subtitles, and learn to use a dictionary to help you out with difficult concepts.

From my experiences and from watching others teach, here are my (five commandments? guidelines? suggestions? whatever you feel they should be) personal philosophy as regards being a teacher and teaching.

1) Never stop studying
As a teacher, you certainly don't know everything there is to know about everything, and the best example you can set your students is to continue to be a student yourself. There is another reason for doing this - as long as you remain a student, you also know just how difficult it is to be a student. It takes hard work to study, and to study effectively, and be constantly doing it yourself you will have empathy with your students and their struggles.

2) Cultivate patience
The biggest enemy of teaching and learning in the classroom is lack of time - most teachers are under pressure to finish a certain part of the curriculum in a certain time frame. However, even within these constraints, being a patient teacher pays off better, both for the learners and for the teachers. By patience I mean the following: Do not jump in with the answers when you see students struggling to answer. Give them time to answer. Allow them to find answers on their own. And since repetition is one of the key elements of learning, be patient when you have to repeat a section you have taught before.

3) Focus on the positive, not the negative
It sounds simple, but rewarding positive behaviour works better at building discipline than punishing negative behaviours. Of course there are certain things that have to be addressed as they happen - bullying, disruptive behaviour and disrespect, but generally the more you reward positive behaviour, even with something as trivial as a smile and a thumbs-up, the more disciplined the whole class becomes.

4) Reward good learning behaviours and discourage poor ones
This also seems self-evident, yet most schools tend to focus on getting kids to study to pass a test, rather than studying to understand the material. This link is a useful read: http://educ.queensu.ca/~russellt/howteach/plt-glb.htm , and so is this one: http://www.ldpride.net/learningstyles.MI.htm which helps you to assess your own and your students learning styles.

5) Bring positive energy into the classroom
I've had days when I'm feeling ill or depressed, and generally on those days the students are more disruptive, more apathetic and more inclined not to learn. Even if you do bring lots of energy and enthusiasm into the class, it does not mean that the students will suddenly all be bright and happy, but the general mood will be better and more conducive to learning.

Finally, realise that your job is to present new knowledge in such a way that the student who has no background in the subject, or minimal understanding of the subject, can understand it. Whether he or she then learns it remains, ultimately, up to them.

Most often, the biggest problem for someone working in the public school system, is how to motivate and involve those students who have the following attitude towards formal education:

I'm here because I have to be - my parents sent me here. I don't want what you are offering me. I want to play, I don't want to study. This subject is of no use to me and what I want to be one day.

This is especially true when they have to learn a language. And this is where the game and puzzle collection can come to the rescue of the teacher (and student). By presenting them with a puzzle that they have to solve using the language, especially if it is an interesting puzzle, they forget that they resent the classroom and the subject, and instead engage with what they perceive as play.

A warning word here - just as we have different learners (audio, visual and kineasthetic) in the class, so we have different puzzle solvers, and we have differing responses to the puzzles presented. For instance, when I present a wordsearch grid to a class, some students do ot even wait for me to explain what I want them to do, but immediately start hunting among the jumble of letters for the words in the list. These same students may flag and lose interest when I present a 'Where's Wally' type of puzzle.

So, the trick is to have several puzzles, all with the same objective but achieving it in different ways, and allowing the students to engage with the puzzles they prefer.

As an example - if i want them to engage with the vocabulary words we have been learning, I will present a wordsearch grid, a crossword puzzle, a cryptogram and a spot the hidden object puzzle, all of them using the same ten or twenty words. That way, whichever puzzle the student chooses to do, they will be exposed to the same word list, will have to read or write the words in some form and thus will be engaged in processing these words.

Similarly, physical games may appeal to some and not to others, and the solution is to vary the action and thus involve everyone at some level. However, most children respond well to action games such as catching a ball, saying a word and then throwing the ball to the next student who has to say a word that start with the last letter of the preceding word; or to 'Simon Says'; or to blind man's bluff.

An excellent site for puzzles - both in suggestions and for making your own, is this one:

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/

A good site for actual physical games that work in a language classroom is this one:

http://www.genkienglish.net/

Think about the games you enjoyed as a child, and draw on these to create classroom games where language use plays a role. For you and your students a happy, joyous learning experience is only a game away!

 This journal, I hope, will become not only a place where I can share my ideas and experiences about being a teacher in general and being a language teacher specifically, but will be a place where people can raise questions, debate the answers, and interact about EFL, ESL etc.

To start with, let me state my own position on what it takes to be a language teacher.

You need lots and lots of patience - patience enough to let students struggle to find the words to communicate with you, patience enough to listen to them stumble through a simple reading exercise and patience enough to allow them to make mistakes.

You need to be passionate about teaching, and it helps if you are constantly reviewing what is happening in the field of language teaching, as well as hunting for games, puzzles and interesting topics to use in the class.

You need to be a bit of everything - clown, liontamer, martinet, best friend and encyclopedia.

What is it that you don't need?

You don't need to speak a language other than the one you are teaching, but it helps.

You don't need to  be an entertainer.

You don't need to be the person with all the answers - language is evolving, and so you will never know everything about it - just know where to find it.

You don't need a fancy classroom, textbooks, toys, games, etc. but they help.

In future posts I'll address quite a variety of the topics I find teachers ask about the most and talk about the most, giving you my take on them. I hope we'll have a great time together.