ESL Lesson Plan

I did, sometimes, until my ESL trainor told us something about handling personal emotions and not projecting them to your students . He said it in just one sentence "Leave your personal problems at the gate of your school."

The first instance of teacher projection that comes to mind is what happened in the afermath of 9/11/01, at a school a few hours from Manhattan where I coordinated an ESL program.

Naturally the teachers were traumatized by the attack and when classes resumed a day or so after, the teachers could not stop talking about the horror of it all. Every day the teachers would come into their classes with more and more information on the sequence of the planes being hijacked, taken over and crashed,and how people died, and the rescue efforts, the recovery efforts, the ongoing exposure of terror cells and terror threats etc.

I had several students comes into my office and complain, gently, that it was too much for them. One Colombian woman told me, " I know a lot about terrorism; I lived with it every day. It's why I left my country. And I can't hear about it every day. I can't." She stopped going to classes after a couple of weeks.

It was pretty obvious that some of the teachers were deeply troubled by the attack and were using the classroom situation to come to terms with it. Some of our foreign students,in addition to being non-American citizens, were not unaccustomed to being vulnerable to terrorism and the whims of evil men. For them, the events of 9/11 did not have the same impact as it did on our teachers.

At our next staff meeting, we all talked about the instability of the world as of late and I suggested that we keep the classroom a place where students could relax and not have to deal with weighty matters for a while. " And who knows?" I added, " it might be nice for you as well to put those things aside for a while."

The issue didn't come up again after that, but I'm sure the teachers were still affected.

Edna - I wish it was that easy...unfortunately, a lot of this behavior is generally unconscious as manifested in teachers. However, thinking about student behavior with regards to their own mental processes can be very enlightening and may be the starting point from which we can learn a bit about ourselves.

Marlen

Tricia,

Thanks for sharing this story, illustrating the impact of teacher behavior on students' learning experiences.

Something you said was very important - "At our next staff meeting...". Sadly, many of us work in situations where there are no staff meetings. How this is possible still baffles me (speaking from personal experience). But I feel that one of the best way to help develop effective teachers is through peer interaction and sharing. I'm happy to hear that this is (may) be happening at your school!

Marlen

thank you very much for your help. You guys rock, thanks again.