Recently, I attended a presentation conducted by a very experienced English teacher who was now working for one of the big language publishing houses. At one point of his talk, he made a comment that I think grabbed most people’s attention.
He said, “there is no shame in [using this] to take a break during the class.”
I think many teachers in the room were in agreement, although collectively embarrassed that someone would actually voice such a provocative opinion.
I agree with what he said.
Sometimes, I feel as though I need to juice every moment out of the class, so that the children take away as much as they possibly can.
In many cases, that’s actually counter productive.
Its kind of like continuing to work, even though you’re tired, just so that you can be more ‘productive’. However, it might actually be far more productive to take a good break and then return to work, even if it means you then have less time to complete your work.
My sense of what he was saying was that teaching is hard work. If you need to use a ‘tool’ during the class in order to take some breathing space for yourself, then you should do that.
He wasn’t talking about deliberately using methods to waste time.
There are ‘tools’ that you can incorporate into the lesson plan for your class to make it less stressful, or to reduce your workload.
For example, instead of cutting up the mini flash cards, you can have the children do a ‘cutting dictation’. (A cutting dictation is like a listening dictation, the children listen for the word and cut out the mini-flash card from a sheet.) It will most certainly take the children a longer time to cut the mini-cards than it would for you to. However, the cutting dictation is a productive activity for the children, and it gives you some breathing time. As a settling activity, you can factor that into the ebb and flow of your lesson plan.
Other times, I’ll take a ‘break’ by playing a fun song that’s unrelated to the unit, or spontaneously switching up an activity I’d planned, to something else that is easier for me to execute.
Most importantly, which I think is what the presenter was getting at, was that we don’t have to feel guilty for taking care of ourselves.
