Even the most experienced teacher has a bad teaching day sometimes. Everything seems to go wrong and you feel like the worst teacher in the world. Even though I love my job 99% of the time, ever so often I have a day that makes me feel like I never want to see any child again, let alone a class of 25 of them. If you’re just starting out teaching, a day like this can make you feel like throwing in the towel and getting as far away as you can from the madness that teaching English can be. That would be a shame though. Honestly, the fun and joy that teaching gives me more than makes up for the bad days. You just need a few ideas to help you cope with it and then move on. So whether you are a beginner teacher or more experienced, here are some coping techniques and simple ideas to help.
Try and work out why it was a bad teaching day
Get yourself a nice cup of tea, sit down on the sofa and have a think. What happened today that was different from normal? Were you unprepared for your lesson? Was your lesson plan perhaps not as fun as it could have been or too complicated maybe? Were the kids restless because of something else that was happening in school that day? Did one child in particular distract attention and prevent you from teaching well? It’s not a question of blaming yourself or anyone else for your bad teaching day. Just try and understand why things went wrong and that will give you some ideas of how you can do better next time and avoid the same problems happening again.
What can you do to improve things for your next class?
Once you have a idea of why things went wrong in a particular class, you can start trying to change them. This will avoid this class becoming something that you dread every week and that stops you enjoying your job. So take each point in turn and see what you can do to avoid a further bad teaching day.
Was it your lesson plan?
If the problem was your lesson plan, think how you could adapt it to suit the children in that class. Could you play different games that avoid getting them very excited. Or more exciting games if they seemed bored and distracted? If the children seem very tired, maybe do some quieter activities rather than tiring them out more. Whatever the problem, you should be able to tweak your lesson plan without redoing the whole thing or leaving out any particular teaching points.
Was there a problem with discipline?
If you have a class where discipline is a problem, it can be completely exhausting and demoralizing to teach. It completely drains your confidence as a teacher when you feel that a class is out of control and that you are failing to teach them. It doesn’t matter what age they are either: I have personally had classes of 5 year olds where I felt completely out of my depth. So, think of what you can do to try and regain control of a class like this. There are thousands of techniques for discipline if you have a quick Google. Have a read of some of them and see if you can find something that you think would help and that is suited to your style of teaching. Talk to your more experienced colleagues to see if they have any tried and tested ideas. Try and talk directly to the child or children concerned if the same children are consistently disturbing your class. Maybe there is an underlying issue that you may be able to uncover.
Was it something that was completely out of your control?
Maybe there was a fire drill which lasted for half of your lesson or most of the kids were absent because of a snow blizzard. This completely ruined the lesson you had planned and you didn’t manage to cover everything you wanted. Honestly, in this kind of situation, there was not really much you could do. You could have alternative activities on your lesson plan for if there are less students than you were expecting. You could also choose the most important activities and highlight them to do in case you have less time than expected. But otherwise, just relax. Hopefully next class will be better.
Now, relax, forget about it and move on
There is no point in dwelling on a bad teaching day. It’s over, you’ve thought about what you can do to make things better, it honestly wasn’t the end of the world. So, forget about what happened today and start thinking about what you’re going to be doing tomorrow. Don’t let one bad day sap your self confidence and sabotage yourself. It will be a fresh start and if you start out positively, should be fine. So have a hot drink, get a good night’s sleep and get out bright and early ready for a new day.
I’d love to hear what you do when you have a bad teaching day. What do you do to make yourself feel better? Do you have any techniques you can recommend. To stay up to date with new posts and ideas, you can follow the GoogooEnglish Facebook page. Alternatively, you can sign up for email updates by filling in the form below.