text: Please share and add to these ideas, and especially please be kind to yourselves, it’s a whole new way of teaching and we’re all newbies here!
  I don’t know about you but being plunged into the world of online teaching felt like learning a whole new job and set of skills overnight. I felt like a complete novice teacher again, and in fact I was. I had to learn from scratch what worked and what didn’t, I watched webinars, read articles, and as always – learnt from experience. It was a challenge, but after two months I’d finally developed a new skill set and was enjoying my zoom lessons as much as my students.
  In Geneva schools opened again on 11th May, under strict sanitary guidelines and I found myself teaching half the class at a time (which was often the case because our school has always split at least two thirds of the language class hours anyway), so far so good you may say.
  Yes, it was lovely to see everyone again, to have face-to-face (or mask to mask!) contact, to see my colleagues, for students who had weak internet connection to finally join in, to no longer have to spend my evenings scanning chapters for those who’d left their books at school.
  However, the new rules mean the teachers must wear a mask when moving around the school. When the students have entered a classroom, we have all disinfected our hands and they have sat in their new socially distanced places then I can remove my mask if I stay standing at the front of the class, at least two metres away from the students. Some classrooms even have plastic screens I can sit behind.
  I cannot give worksheets, cards, games, anything in fact to my students. I cannot take in their work, I cannot move around the classroom checking their work, or making suggestions. Students cannot work in pairs, share documents or materials, they cannot work in groups. I cannot move from in front of the whiteboard. A student who has forgotten his/her book cannot share with a neighbour, students no longer have neighbours! The French education ministry has officially declared that results from this period (how was I supposed to mark their work anyway??) are not to be taken into account, and certain students have quickly realised what this entails. However new rules mean we cannot remove a student from the classroom if their behaviour disturbs the lesson, there are no longer detentions or written sanctions in case of misbehaviour, students who would whisper to their classmates before now need to call out in order to be heard…
  My first thoughts when trying to prepare my post-confinement classes were about all the things we cannot do, and I’ll admit that a few of my lessons felt like I’d gone back in time a hundred years or so, me writing on the board and the students copying it ( with me having no idea whether what they were copying was correct or not!).
  This is NOT the kind of “teaching” I want in my classroom, it’s soul destroying and boring, I’m continually trying to make my lessons more inclusive; avoiding my students having to copy from the board, giving time for everyone to discretely ask for help if they need it, leaving a box of fast-finisher activities at the front of the class or students to delve into and find a fun activity to be getting on with while the others finish, plenty of “think-share-pair”…
  So think is what I’ve been doing and I’ll be sharing any ideas I come up with over the next week or so. In the meantime, please share yours below.
  Look carefully, describe in detail, would you like to work here? What do you think could/might/should/must be on the desk? Who do you think would work in a place like this? (Your English teacher?!) Would you like to?
  What I love about this lesson is that students can really go to town on their strengths, music, designing posters, character study, etc. I often use it at the end of a chapter to bring in everything they’ve learnt, for example this week a class will be preparing a series set in Australia, including at least four animals and I want a superlative in the title/by line.
  I was looking through some TED talks today, which I often do when I want some inspiration (for life as well as class!) and came across this brilliant guy who travelled from Washington D.C. to Antarctica.
  I thought I’d share the comprehension questions (with answers!) for you in cas you’re interested, I’ve left it in simple word format so you can play about with it!
  Cut up a pile of rectangular pieces of coloured paper – say 15cm x 5cm and write a word on each one, you can use them to revise the grammar or vocabulary of your choice: