Teacher happiness

 For all the teachers out there, both primary and ESL, you will know how I feel with this next post.

I started with a new low Elementary class this week with a wide-ranging nationality mix: Czech, Korean, Thai, Brazilian, Italian, Turkish, Saudi, Indonesian and a Cuban brother and sister. These are apparently the lowest level class in the school at the moment. I've only got them for two weeks total (10 teaching days) and yesterday was Day Four, so I thought I would use some Shoebox techniques to get them moving with their past simple. At the end of Wednesday's class, I asked them to write diaries and bring them in for Thursday. They DID. Almost every one of the fourteen students wrote a diary and gave it to me to mark. I can't begin to tell you my delight when they used most of the teaching points (Past simple regular and irregular, After that, compound sentences, infinitive of purpose and coordinating conjunctions) correctly. There were high fives, fist pumps, grins of delight and even some teacher dancing. Wonderful. Sheer teaching happiness.