There is a famous story of a Chinese warrior.   As a reward for a particularly brave campaign the emperor asked him what he would like as a reward.

“I’d like one grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard.  2 grains on the 2nd square,  4 on the 3rd square and 8 grains on the 4th square.  Doubling each time up to the 64th square.”

The emperor thought for a moment.

And although it seemed like a very small quantity of rice, he agreed.

In fact he’d just agreed to give the warrior 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice.

Thats over 500 billion tons.

So how does this help me?

So now imagine if you had one English teacher who taught 8 new words each lesson.

And then another teacher who taught the students how to double the amount of English they could speak in each lesson.

Whose students would progress the most?

Well, we can’t promise doubling in every lesson.

In some lessons we can e.g. just teaching the word “not” doubles the amount of expressions with can use with adjectives. 

And adding in pronouns early to your curriculum can multiply the amount of phrases we can use with How are you?  by 8 times.    From 8 to 64 different phrases.

So …. when you think about your lessons, what can you teach today that not only adds a few words, but doubles, triples or more the amount of English your students can say?

Be genki,

Richard