by Kylowna Moton

by Brett W. Harmony

I came into English teaching as a writer looking to fund his traveling.  As a writer I spent much of my time trying to compose “perfect” sentences.  As a result, I came to English Language Teaching (ELT) with an  understanding of the language that was intuitive.  I did not know the grammatical terminology, but once I learned that I felt I would be able to teach the language.  I had also spent much of my adolescence drawing pictures, and that helped me with my board work.  These skills have helped my teaching, but I learned early on that they were not enough.  The skills that I had needed to be adapted and there were many others that I had to nurture as well.  ELT was more than grammar and drawing pictures on the board.

I like fun activities.  Because I used them often, I found that I was a popular teacher and the private institutions I worked for liked me because I brought them revenue.  Though I began to notice that students from other classes had skills that mine did not, such as an awareness of how they were learning and a greater accuracy when speaking.  As I started to give reluctantly give more homework and focus on accuracy, I realized that many of my students welcomed this.  Instead of having a rebellion on my hands, as I expected, my students worked willingly and diligently.  They also started

time and concentrate on theirs when they get an opportunity to say it.  They know how to get into groups and participate in the feedback of their homework.  Furthermore, we collect the vocabulary they have learned and reuse it and connect it to new vocabulary.  With most presentations they get an opportunity to use the structures again.  They still get some varied, exciting lessons, but they also get the familiar and the ability to see their own learning grow.

My philosophy of teaching is to use what I know and what I am good at but also push myself to go further and into territories I might be unfamiliar with.  My knowledge of writing helped me in the first few years with syntax, but I could not rely on that.  Similarly, my fun activities helped me push my students but without someplace to push them to.  My early skills are still within my bag of tricks, but I have had to develop many more and I will never have enough.  Teaching has become the bigger challenge, and now I spend my time trying to teach the “perfect” lessons. 

to improve in ways they hadn’t before.  Fun was no longer the objective of my lessons, but rather the booster that sometimes motivated learning.

Along with fun I wanted each lesson to be a unique experience for my students.  I tried many different techniques and approaches, such as role-playing, the silent way, and creative writing to stimulate my class.  Those lessons were often successful at motivating and energizing my classes.   Instead of building on them and exploiting them further I often jumped to the next new thing.  In the process, my students often forgot things from previous lessons and presentations.  While I now understand that variety is an important part of the learning process, I also know that recycling, reusing, and repeating have helped me and my students build upon what we have learned and given us some routines to rely on.  For example, when we do pronunciation the students learn to look at my mouth when hearing the word for the first