Hello

Svitlana just wrote in to ask:

What do you usually do when something goes wrong at the lesson?  

You celebrate!   You’ve pushed the boundaries, have learnt something new and you’re progressing with your teaching.

So smile, learn, move on!

The opposite, of course, is simply stagnation.

When some great ideas fail do you feel frustrated? 

Why would you feel frustrated?  Mistakes and failure are how humans learn.

Let’s celebrate that!

Even with Genki English we say it has a 99% success rate, so at least once in every 100 lessons something “interesting” will happen. 🙂

How do you cope with it?

Plan.

I always have three lesson plans stored away for any lesson.

Plus I have a backup up of “emergency” ideas that I know will always work.

But once you know how education really works you embrace everything about it, including the chances to learn that some people call “failure.”

The biggest failure is sticking to horrible old ways of teaching that don’t work just because we feel we “have to.”

To learn is to grow.

And to do that we have to be out of our comfort zones!

Be genki,

Richard