Our Teaching Schedules

Our holiday break is over and we are teaching once again. I taught two 90-minute lessons yesterday and have one today. Bethanie had a one-to-one cancelled this morning and she teaches two 90-minute slots this afternoon as well.

In case you’re wondering, here’s how our schedules work. International House, the school we teach at, teaches students English at 10 competency levels, including beginner, elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper intermediate, advanced, and super duper advanced (obviously not the technical term.) We teach ages 6+. Right now, Beth and I each teach about 10 classes per week. Each class lasts 90 minutes. And we can teach up to three a day, not exceeding 14 classes per week. Most of our classes are with late teens and adults. However, Beth does teach students as young as 9. Class times generally run from 3:30-5, 5:15-6:45 and 7-8:30. Sometimes we have classes at other times for business classes. These are classes where we have to dress up a little bit – I wear a tie – and we go to the business to teach the class. The topics we teach business students don’t differ much from a regular class, but usually we try to make the lessons more business oriented of course.

The planning time for each class takes 1 to 2 hours, depending on the level we’re teaching. Generally, it takes more planning for higher level classes because they cover a lot of material and it’s more complex than lower level classes. Hopefully as we get this whole thing down, we’ll be able to plan much faster.

So there you go! That’s the gist of it. Probably more information than you ever wanted to know. All that teaching and planning makes it a 40+ hour job. But it’s loads of fun as well and the good thing is that if a lesson bombs, it’s easy to forget about it because I’ve got so many other lessons to prepare for and make better.