You're at your computer at the ripe time of 3:00am wearing your orange T-shirt. You have your Dino plushie, your 5 apple mug, and you've written your students' name in wonderfully bold colors on the board behind you. You wait and watch the timer count down and right at the 2-second mark you flip on your computer and smile brightly at the student who is not there.
You begin to watch the timer counting up to the 30minute mark, anxiously wondering if your student will arrive. You then change lines or refresh your screen a few times just to be sure. You might even open a second window, log into your VIPKID teacher account on this window just to make sure there wasn't a last minute cancellation or worse...you're in the wrong classroom. Nope. Everything is kosher. The 5minute mark passes and finally, you hear a noise and the camera flips on. You beam at them, yelling "HELLO! How are you?" and Baobao sits back in his chair, crosses his arms, and glares at you. It is Saturday afternoon Beijing time. He is 12. He does NOT want to be in the classroom.
What do you do? How do you engage the raging tweenager sulking angrily in front of you? It's only 25-30 minutes you tell yourself, but he doesn't understand that...a tweenagers sense of time works in leaps and bounds where 10 minutes can feel like 10 hours. It's going to be a long class. What should you do?
For starters, dial it down a bit. Most of the tween crowd aren't as enthusiastic about all the bells and whistles. Try something different with students this age. Usually, students in this age group already know some spoken English and don't feel that they need to play the "silly games" on the slides. This is perfectly OK! Yes, you need to go through each slide but you do not have to do it the way the instructions say to do it. It's OK to get creative, to shake things up a little. Do things out of order, rearrange the lesson plan. And ask the student what they think they need to work on.
You can throw in some interesting vocabulary. Ask them if there is an American movie that they would like to see, were there any words they didn't understand? It's OK to encourage your student to try to think of a word that isn't a part of the lesson so long as they are learning what the meaning of the word is, are spelling the words correctly, and are pronouncing them correctly as well.
You begin to watch the timer counting up to the 30minute mark, anxiously wondering if your student will arrive. You then change lines or refresh your screen a few times just to be sure. You might even open a second window, log into your VIPKID teacher account on this window just to make sure there wasn't a last minute cancellation or worse...you're in the wrong classroom. Nope. Everything is kosher. The 5minute mark passes and finally, you hear a noise and the camera flips on. You beam at them, yelling "HELLO! How are you?" and Baobao sits back in his chair, crosses his arms, and glares at you. It is Saturday afternoon Beijing time. He is 12. He does NOT want to be in the classroom.
What do you do? How do you engage the raging tweenager sulking angrily in front of you? It's only 25-30 minutes you tell yourself, but he doesn't understand that...a tweenagers sense of time works in leaps and bounds where 10 minutes can feel like 10 hours. It's going to be a long class. What should you do?
For starters, dial it down a bit. Most of the tween crowd aren't as enthusiastic about all the bells and whistles. Try something different with students this age. Usually, students in this age group already know some spoken English and don't feel that they need to play the "silly games" on the slides. This is perfectly OK! Yes, you need to go through each slide but you do not have to do it the way the instructions say to do it. It's OK to get creative, to shake things up a little. Do things out of order, rearrange the lesson plan. And ask the student what they think they need to work on.
You can throw in some interesting vocabulary. Ask them if there is an American movie that they would like to see, were there any words they didn't understand? It's OK to encourage your student to try to think of a word that isn't a part of the lesson so long as they are learning what the meaning of the word is, are spelling the words correctly, and are pronouncing them correctly as well.
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