Previous to this lesson, for the 17th of June lesson, I had gotten down on myself, feeling upset through the week. I felt I failed the lesson. I sought out my brother’s advice, a teacher at the elementary school level. He told me he also became distraught at times; “Did my students even learn anything?” he said to me.

This lessened my distress.

I knew I could improve on the lesson. I just needed to reset my expectations. I had to make myself understand these sorts of things are a process. Move forward one step at a time. What I attempted to do was shortcut the process, which led to my failure. I needed to at least resolve one of my major mistakes from the previous week, which was pointed out to me by my sponsor teacher: my speaking pace. The other was getting away from my lesson plan.

To improve on my speaking pace—to slow it down for my ESL students—I needed to practice a little everyday. Get it to something acceptable, something that an ESL student could understand.

As for sticking to the lesson plan, that was a different tact. Much of this is was trusting myself, and trusting my students. I lost trust in myself, which led to a loss of trust in the latter. I doubted my plan, and so, my lesson went awry. Fortunately, my partner was on the ball, and so it was not a total failure.

Anyway, this was a rehash of the previous week. The lesson for the 24th was a step-up for myself. I recovered relatively nicely. It was a lesson on Canadian culture and hockey. There was an issue though; having the students speak more. If we have three or four students, then we want all four students to have a chance at speaking. However, I do not know if this happened. I will need to pay attention to this in the future. Also, the topics were perhaps more abstract then they needed to be. The level of our students is high; they are one level away from becoming academic level students, but we still need to temper the questions more compactly. The questions us teachers ask must be more focused and direct.