Ed's Blogs, Variety

As I said before, the main focus is the interest or the energy of the conversation... how to keep the energy at a high enough level so that it's possible for your students to be interested in it. Now, to some extent you will never be able to control the student. I mean if the student is having a bad day, well, they're not going to be interested in anything. But if you are doing your part and you are making the intere... the discussion energetic enough, then you will be at least giving the student a chance to be interested. Now, um, the point I made in the pa.. last podcast was that it's not necessarily easy to predict what will be energising or interesting for the group. And um... so that raises the question: What are you going to do to prepare? Well some peo.. you don't have to prepare, that's one... one answer to the question. I think that at LINGQ the... um some of the tutors are people who prepare and some of them may not prepare very much. I'm a person who prepares... although sometimes I prepare too much which actually doesn't help me... it just makes me annoyed because I'm obsessing over something that I know I have no control over. And sometimes I don't prepare at all... which goes alright, I'd say, fifty percent of the time, and the other fifty percent of the time, I realise that I'm selling the students a bit short by not preparing. So how do you find the happy medium? How do you prepare.. uh...if you are person who will prepare, how do you prepare to the extent which won't make you resentful and which will be giving the students the best value. Well, I think that uhh one technique... and this will be my major point for this podcast... is the idea of variety. You should be always ready to change the current of a conversation at any point and so in preparation for that you should try to have as many different takes on a certain topic as you possibly can. Or perhaps even multiple topics. That will be always more interesting for the students I think than trying to squeeze as much out of one topic as you possibly can. So, um... preparation could be writing out as many different questions on each topic and preparing as many different topics as you can within a reasonable time frame.

As I said before, the main focus is the interest or the energy of the conversation... how to keep the energy at a high enough level so that it's possible for your students to be interested in it. Now, to some extent you will never be able to control the student. I mean if the student is having a bad day, well, they're not going to be interested in anything. But if you are doing your part and you are making the intere... the discussion energetic enough, then you will be at least giving the student a chance to be interested.
Now, um, the point I made in the pa.. last podcast was that it's not necessarily easy to predict what will be energising or interesting for the group. And um... so that raises the question: What are you going to do to prepare? Well some peo.. you don't have to prepare, that's one... one answer to the question. I think that at LINGQ the... um some of the tutors are people who prepare and some of them may not prepare very much. I'm a person who prepares... although sometimes I prepare too much which actually doesn't help me... it just makes me annoyed because I'm obsessing over something that I know I have no control over. And sometimes I don't prepare at all... which goes alright, I'd say, fifty percent of the time, and the other fifty percent of the time, I realise that I'm selling the students a bit short by not preparing.
So how do you find the happy medium? How do you prepare.. uh...if you are person who will prepare, how do you prepare to the extent which won't make you resentful and which will be giving the students the best value. Well, I think that uhh one technique... and this will be my major point for this podcast... is the idea of variety. You should be always ready to change the current of a conversation at any point and so in preparation for that you should try to have as many different takes on a certain topic as you possibly can. Or perhaps even multiple topics. That will be always more interesting for the students I think than trying to squeeze as much out of one topic as you possibly can. So, um... preparation could be writing out as many different questions on each topic and preparing as many different topics as you can within a reasonable time frame.