Have you ever wondered why entertainers like movie stars or rock stars can earn hundreds of millions of dollars per year, but the best paid English teachers in the world only earn a few hundred thousand or just a few million dollars per year?
The reason is: State Change.
People love people who can change their state.
If you think about your best friends, the ones who you like to hang around with, they are probably the ones who make you feel great.
They change your state when you’ve having a bad day to it being a great day.
And I’m sure you also know some other people who you don’t like to be around because they steal all your energy 🙂
And that’s why entertainers get paid so much, because their job is to change your state. Whether that’s from stressed to relaxed by watching a movie, tired to laughing outloud for a comedian or sad to happy with a musician, the ones who can change how we feel the most get loved the most.
That’s why the Genki English songs are so successful in your class, yes the song lyrics all have the key English to make it easy to remember, but it’s the music, the instrumentation, that makes you genki, going from bored to suddenly feeling super energetic, it’s all because I write the music that way.
So my question for today is, besides of course using the Genki English songs,
What other ways are you using in your classes to change the state of your students? What is their mood, their energy, their genkiness level like before and then after your class?
Fix that and you’ll never have to worry about finding new students ever again 🙂
You know you can do it!! 🙂
Be genki,
Richard
P.S. A couple extra ways you can change someone’s state; beautiful compliments, dancing around, aiming for a goal together, genki music and of course lots of big, big smiles 🙂
I just demand that they are “Active Learners” and not just passive members of the class. You must move, you must express yourself, you must communicate with your friends and you must THINK. Expect challenges to be thrown at you, if you don’t succeed the first time, you will by the end of the class. More often than not even if kids come to class tired, quiet and with their heads down they leave in a positive state of mind.
Nice!!
That is why i dance ,i sing,i play game such as snake and ladder games ,guessing games,hangman games with them….sometimes i make video tutorial or advertisement video with the student in upper level or anything that we could think and share and happy more in the class
I always try to take advantage of the students’ passions. Once, when we had a “power-lifter” in the class, we used plastic bottles with water to serve as weights during our 2-minute workouts with him acting as a coach.
At other times, we learned some nice dance moves from student-dancers).
Students also particularly enjoy “field trips” when they leave the classroom to interview other students and teachers.
In other words, getting away from a textbook, giving students a chance to ‘shine”, works wonders))
Tamara
By giving the students a sense of mastery of the subject matter, as well as empowering them to use that newfound confidence in novel, creative ways. I’ve had success in inviting teens to create poetry around a theme of beauty such as the coming of spring with its related sense impressions (sight/color, sounds, fragrances, emotions etc.). I elicit relevant vocabulary and board it. Then I recite a piece of poetry to model what I’m looking for. I go round and do minimal correcting of what the students have written (only to make what they want to convey, comprehensible – I’m not looking for accuracy. Then I let them share their work with a fellow student.
The goal: Make such creations an ongoing endeavor!