The secret of teaching is to appear to have known all your life what you just learned this morning.

As every teacher knows, but Directors of Studies have long forgotten, we English language teachers are in the entertainment business. Anyone who really wants to learn a language saves a lot of time, hassle and money by buying a book and taking it home and reading it.

So why do people come to expensive English classes?

• Their parents or boss made them.
• They are too lazy to study at home.
• They have nothing else to do on Monday and Wednesday evenings.
• They would not mind shagging a native English-speaker or another student (or both).
• They still believe that by turning up to English lessons twice a week they will somehow master the language.

In these circumstances your priorities are as follows:

1. Keep the students amused.
2. Keep the DOS off your back.
3. Give everybody concerned the impression that the students’ English is improving.

This website should provide you with a few hints.

The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolic and most asinine stupidity of these fat headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls, while the glorious summer suns are burning in heaven and the year is revolving in its richest glow and declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again?
Charlotte Bronte (on teaching)