Teacher Fails

Forgot about the lesson / overslept / came very late

Forgetting about a lesson is every teacher’s nightmare. Unless you work in a public institution, the students will come to class with a desire to be taught, some making a lengthy journey. Coming to all that trouble, for the teacher not to make an appearance is a serious offense.?

If that happens to you, apologise profusely and offer a reasonable explanation. Get a habit of checking your calendar app (and get one if you still haven’t), or even better – set up reminders. Bless the popularisation of online classes due to lockdown, now you can join into class still wearing your nightgown (underneath the hastily put-on shirt of course) and blame the powercut for your lateness.

Prepared for the wrong lesson / used the wrong materials?

This has happened to many a substitute teacher, who took on several of their colleague’s classes. You come to the lesson fully prepared, ask questions and give out tasks only to be met with confusion and bewilderment. One student warily raises their hand and says this is not what they have been studying. Your heart sinks – you’ve brought papers for the wrong class. What can you do??

Keep a straight face and tell the truth – honesty is always the right answer. Ask one of the students to share their copies with you and pick up from where they finished. But make sure you double-check next time.

Made a grammar / lexical mistake

Oh yes, even teachers make language-related mistakes. Be it a simple slip or pure ignorance, these situations are rather common. The former you can brush off, the latter speaks of some gap in your knowledge, but should you eat yourself for it? The consequences of the mistake are rather more dramatic if you explicitly taught your students the wrong thing.?

A common mispronunciation of “to vary” or “recipe” (seriously, check yourselves), or that you can use “should” instead of “would” in second and third conditionals are all examples from real life. Unteaching them will not be a simple feat, and admitting your mistake an even harder one. But this must be done. However, do not eat yourself alive if this happens. You should always keep working on your language and refining it even when you feel confident in your knowledge.

Didn't check materials before sending them

Have you ever stumbled upon an article or a video related to the topic you had been discussing earlier in class? And then just after a passing glance over the text sent it to your students? Chances are the link contained some inappropriate language or topics, that you had simply failed to notice.?

If you spot the traitorous vulgarity yourself before the students open the link – delete it and say you sent it by mistake. If they notice it first - apologise. Hopefully, your students are adults, who will take it in good humour. But next time – remember to check all materials thoroughly until the end, especially if you find them online.

Other noteworthy fails:

?– Had inappropriate background noises;?

?– family members walking in the background in various states of undress;?

?– Used the wrong conference link or mixed up links;?

?–?Word autocorrected to something inappropriate.?

Personal opinion

Hello, My name’s Elzara and I’ve been teaching English for about 7 years. I’ve worked with a big variety of students namely teenagers, adults, and most recently kids aged 6-8. I began to work with children a year ago because I decided to learn something new in my profession, to challenge myself. In my opinion, without challenges, there aren’t discoveries and without discoveries, there isn’t progress or improvement.?

Today I'd like to share with you some of the fails that I've experienced working with both adults and kids.?

To begin with, I remember my first lessons with teenagers when I tried to become a friend to them so that they feel secure and could trust me. By doing this, I hoped they would study better and would be motivated to study English.?

In the beginning, it worked exactly as I planned, but after about a couple of months, I could notice that my teenage students started to see me only as their friend, and not as a teacher anymore.?

I lost control over them, I mean they wanted to tell me jokes and share with me their personal stories and when I asked them to do the exercises they seemed frustrated as if it was something odd and we were not having a lesson.?

I didn't know what to do or how to kindly remind them that we were studying English. In my opinion, Teachers should be very careful when they want to be closer to their teenage students and try to put studying first and not friendship.?

The second mistake that I made in my teaching experience was probably the time when I was working with kids aged 5-8. It is clear that the only way to teach anything to such little kids is by using games; but here is another problem, sometimes teachers become too involved in the process of creating games for the children and may also forget that in each game there should be something that gives the kids knowledge.?

Kids have a lot of fun during the lessons, but are they really learning something? I thought that my kids were not learning enough and I was afraid that we played too much during our lessons.?

In my view, in order not to have such a problem, a teacher should be very careful when designing a game or an activity, the games shouldn't always be aimed at entertaining the kids, they must also be targeted at the language they are learning. A more elaborate design of the activities can probably help a teacher not just play with their students in class.?

Regarding my experience teaching adults, I could say, there was an inappropriate first impression. My appearance usually suggests that I'm quite young and thus am an inexperienced teacher; this is how the majority of adult students might see me.?

I have never been bothered by this, I was mostly worried about my knowledge and competence and whether or not I can answer the questions adult students could ask me about the subject.?

I thought that if I could answer all their questions and could explain everything confidently they would not have any more questions and we would work together for as long as their course lasted.?

But in reality, there are sometimes such students who assess a teacher by their appearance. So what could I do in this situation? I just tried to look as smart as I could and might have appeared more mature and experienced in their eyes.?

I cannot remember any other fails that I might have had in my teaching experience and, probably, I'm now going to tell something that every teacher has heard millions of times.?

But a good teacher must always be ready for the lesson even if the lesson is nothing new for them, they need to revise the topics covered there and plan it so as not to look embarrassed and so incompetent in the eyes of students, especially adult ones.