Open Lessons

I may have mentioned these before. Open Lessons are when a teacher is asked by the administration to show them a typical lesson. Admin schedules these a week ahead of time, typically. With a time gap like this, teachers are expected to prepare this lesson to actually not be a typical lesson, but a prepared super-special lesson.

Typical of the Open Lesson are the following traits:

- costumes

- visuals, posters

- plays

- interactive, physical activities

- music

The things that we volunteers are trained to make all our lessons include. This makes introducing ourselves and our purpose pretty easy: Partners, with my help, we will have an Open Lesson EVERY lesson, and therefore, the stress and panic of Open Lessons will no longer occur!

Which they think super-cool and jump right on immediately, but the idea of planning incessantly is not ingrained, not accepted. The materials, even if I plan on using them, and plan with my partner to use them, will not get used.

I know this is my fault. I must be more aggressive, should have been this whole time, should have been forcing things more... Change doesn't happen by suggesting and expecting things to happen from a suggestion and quick explanation. However, the ground work was already in place -- these Open Lessons prove it. And over time... should have become easier?

It is now possible to do more than 50% of English lessons as Open Lessons... technically.

And so we come to the fatal flaw of the Open Lesson.

The teacher hosting will take the class out of their other classes to practice, to prepare, to gather supplies. The children are informed ahead of time who will answer which questions. Who will match which definitions. Seating gets reassigned. Bags and jackets are stored in other rooms. The rooms themselves will be rearranged so the host teacher can have the most beautiful room possible for their purposes. All these things disarrange other teachers in other rooms in other lessons. Everyone's schedule gets fucked if one teacher has big cheese teachers from other schools coming to observe a lesson.

It's a theatre. I have three partners. 1 refuses to play ball. She teaches normal lessons, be damned what the ministry says. Her lessons normally shoot for higher than average teaching and interaction anyway, so that's cool.

1 gets the importance of both and tries for both, and almost makes both.

1 wins. This one kicks so much Open Lesson ass that she is exhausted for the other 4 lessons on the day, can't concentrate on the 24 lessons in the days leading up to the OL and sleeps through the 18 in the following days.

Overall, it's a waste of time and energy. I refuse to teach them. I'll help my partners prepare for them, but it's a moral imperative of mine to try for each day to have one or two OL-friendly activities. Which means half my time AT school is spent writing, cutting and laminating materials which no one finds particularly normal no matter how many times they see it.

Whatever. They have them. If they want to use them, they know where they are and how to do so.