Let’s face it, when you stroll into class ten minutes late from the pub, you’re in a bit of a spot. You’ve nothing prepped, no materials to hand, no amazing activities up your sleeve.

“Bugger me!” you say to yourself. “What am I going to do with this bunch for an hour and a half?”

That’s why Teaching Unhinged is a godsend. It is a totally brilliant skive dreamed up by some of ELT’s biggest wasters. Follow this methodology and you’ll never need to plan a lesson, cut up little bits of paper, elicit the present perfect or mark homework ever again.

The Ten Rules

These are not so much prescriptive as facilitative. It’s a bit like saying the pub is open from 11am to 11pm, rather than closed from 11pm to 11am. Crucial difference, as I’ve found out when trying to get into the Fox & Hounds at 4 in the morning after a good smoke.

1. Teaching should be done using only the resources that teachers and students have in their pockets.

It’s amazing what a wealth of language this yields. Bits of fluff, dirty tissues, coins... we once did a lesson around a piece of snot. Like, how the snot must have felt being rolled into a ball and shoved into a grubby hanky. Do you know how many words there are to describe the elasticity of snot? Flexibility, resilience, rubberiness, plasticity, ductility, springiness, stretchability, suppleness, pliancy, tolerance... It was cutting-edge stuff.

2. No recorded listening material should be introduced into the classroom: the source of all listening activities should be the students and teacher themselves.

It’s really important the students get to practise these skills, so sometimes I give them a listening lesson. Basically, I talk for 90 minutes about my problems with my boyfriend, Rudy, and the row we had in the pub last night, things like that. The students are fascinated not just by my idiolect and amusing anecdotes but by the glimpse this gives them into another culture, another set of values.

Some people have asked: if the teacher is not a native speaker, how will the students ever get to hear authentic English accents? This is a good question and one me and the group are working on right now.

3. The teacher must sit down at all times that the students are standing and lie down whenever students are seated.

All that hierarchical “teacher is in charge and knows best” shit is just so uncool.

4. All the teacher’s questions must be real questions, such as Do you like caviar? or What did you do on your last skiing trip?, not display questions, such as What’s the past of the verb to go? or Is there a clock on the wall?

I can’t remember what the reason is for this rule. Luke wrote it down on a beermat, but I can’t find it. As soon as I do, I’ll post it on this page.

5. Slavish adherence to a method (such as audiolingualism, Silent Way, TPR, task-based learning, suggestopedia) is unacceptable.

Yeah, some of those methodologies are really weird.

6. A pre-planned syllabus of grammar items is forbidden. Any grammar should emerge from the lesson content, not dictate it.

I think this was on the beermat as well, but it might have been on Rodney’s kebab wrapper.

7. Topics that are generated by the students themselves must be given priority over any other input.

At a lesson last week, for instance, I asked the class what they wanted to talk about. The results were an eye-opener:

• 60%—“Don’t know.”
• 20%—“Sex.”
• 10%—“Go play computer.”
• 10%—“Where it is?”

In the end we talked about tennis shoes.

8. Grading of students into different levels is disallowed: students should be free to join the class that they feel most comfortable in.

Demented Dogfarty wanted to extend this rule to teachers as well, but he had a bit of a fight with Keith over one class, which had some tasty German students in it.

9. The criteria and administration of any testing procedures must be negotiated with the learners.

The students usually tell me they want access to authentic materials, such as dictionaries and the teacher’s book, and they don’t want a fascistic-type teacher standing over them (or lying near them). So I tend to go to the pub during exams. My classes’ results are always really good.

10. Teachers themselves will be evaluated according to only one criterion: that they are not boring.

At Teaching Unhinged we pride ourselves on being all-round interesting guys, not to mention captivating raconteurs. Alex, for instance, works in Jakarta and rides a bicycle everywhere. With his cycling stories he can hold a class spellbound. Or there’s Rob, now in Hungary, who used to work in a bank. His banking-based lessons are really challenging and fun. (And don’t think we haven’t got a sense of humour. We have. But it’s very subtle, a bit too dark and intellectual for some tastes.)

Once my school hired this neurotic woman who wanted to teach loads of grammar and work on what she called the students’ “appalling” writing skills. She didn’t last long.