[susan53]

Hi Marie,

Don't let this get you down - it seems to me that you've reacted really, really well to everything that's happened and that you've been working along the right lines from the start. Your openness to discussing criticisms with the students is particularly nice and the fact that other students were being supportive shows that you're doing OK.

A few things to keep in mind - whatever training you've had, the first year of teaching is always an enormous learning experience (actually, so is the second, and the third, and the fourth, and the ....). You can't possibly expect to do everything right from the beginning - the important thing is that you try things out, evaluate them, change what didn't work etc. And yes, you'll find that what works with one class doesn't always with the second - maybe they were a different age, or level, or it was a different time of day - all these things and many more can have an effect.

I wonder if the student found the games boring because they were just there in their own right rather than contributing to the overall language objective for the lesson? This is where the book comes in. As a new teacher, yes I do think you need to teach from the book to give structure and coherence to the course - providing it's a good book. If it is, then the activities it provides should be interesting enough in themselves that "entertaining" the students shouldn't need to be something to worry about- it should be a natural consequence of the activities themselves. Of course, that doesn't mean you can't add, subtract and generally tweak a bit. This is where games come in. Add in a couple of games to a lesson because they practise the language point you've been teaching, or use them as warmers or finishers - but don't let them "take over" from the teaching.

I don't know if you've done a TEFL course? If so, it should have dealt with using and adapting a coursebook to suit the needs of your students and should have given you a lot of teaching techniques to draw on. If not, you need to acquire that knowledge as fast as you can. Get yourself a good basic book on Teaching EFL, and start looking at methodology sites as well as those which provide activities. It won't replace a course, but it's better than nothing. I won't go on because if you have done a course it's irrelevant, but pm me if you want some concrete suggestions.

But - back to feeling humiliated. Don't - there's really no need. I'm sure that every teacher reading this could point to a similar experience somewhere during their career. The difference between good and bad teachers is not that the good ones don't mess up sometimes or get criticised, but that they're the ones who care about it, and even more importantly, do something about it. An NLP saying is that there is no failure - only feedback.