relus Posted March 28, 2005 at 10:10 PM Report Share Posted March 28, 2005 at 10:10 PM Hello. Im curious and wanted to ask those that teach english in china, how much unpaid prep time(minutes/hours) do you put in the average day in teaching? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roddy Posted March 29, 2005 at 01:39 AM Report Share Posted March 29, 2005 at 01:39 AM When I started my first decent TEFL job (I’m not counting a year of elementary school teaching in a pretty poor private school in China) in Spain, I was spending about 45min-1hour per hour, but I think that amount of time is only necessary when you are starting off and need to do stuff like teach yourself the grammar and so on. I think after a year’s experience you should be down to 30 mins per hour AT THE MOST – ie if you are covering a topic you haven’t done before, or working with a new textbook. As time goes on you develop a little mental bank of activities that you can dip into and it shouldn’t be too difficult to walk in with very little preparation and produce a reasonable, if not spectacular, lesson. By the time I quit teaching I was probably down to 15 minutes for every two hour block, but by that point I knew the textbooks inside out, and could think up extra activities (y’know – silent reading. Essay writing. Coffee fetching) for the students to do while they were busy taking their coats off and rattling their pencilboxes around. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wushijiao Posted April 2, 2005 at 12:54 AM Report Share Posted April 2, 2005 at 12:54 AM I would also say that I prepare about 30 minutes to an hour per class. Of course, the way it works now, I teach the same class to different levels, so the second time I teach the same thing I prep maybe two minutes, or just enough to XEROX what I need. Right now I have to prep four times per week, not including when I teach the same thing twice or thrice. Some of my diligent co-workers prep 2-4 hours before each class, while others prep as much as their hangovers will allow. I used to teach only "Oral English" to ten different classes per week. This meant every Sunday I spent two or three hours searching for ideas. After that, I just had to tweak the lesson based on the class level, meaning I had insane amounts of free time. Those were the days. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
马杰 Posted April 4, 2005 at 03:31 AM Report Share Posted April 4, 2005 at 03:31 AM Having a laptop helps a great deal, and you can waste entire weeks interpreting the Simpsons and Seinfeld to the students. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trevelyan Posted April 14, 2005 at 01:16 PM Report Share Posted April 14, 2005 at 01:16 PM I could always get away with no preparation time at all. Think on your feet! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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