How To Not Fall Asleep While Teaching

Teaching gets boring sometimes. Not that I’m an old pro or anything, but when you have to go over the conjugations of “to be” 18 times in an hour, your mind starts to wander. To combat boredom, I’ve come up with a number of ways to keep myself entertained.


First, I write my own exercises. This allows me to, a), correct all of the mistakes in the official teaching document we have, and b), put in funnier names. I’ve used celebrities, Disney characters, entertaining Beninese names (Fati being my current favorite), and, of course, friends’ names. See below.

Next, I do my best to call on kids with funny names. This is maybe unfair, but really, when a child’s name is Aude (“odd”), Parfait, or Abiodoun… how can you resist? Related: when grading 5,000 quizzes and homeworks this weekend, I made it a point to look for entertaining sentences that kids had accidentally written. My favorite (4):

Third, I make my own visual aids. Kids find my drawings hilarious, and even when my art skills confuse them terribly (it took me 5 minutes to explain that my picture of “boy” was not, in fact, a newborn baby. It had pants, okay?), it’s fun to draw vocabulary words. Plus, it’s doubly fun to make them copy my awful drawings into their copybooks… Muahahahah.

Finally, and most importantly, I talk to myself. Kids who speak no English and very little French can’t decipher swear words spoken in whisper, so I can say pretty much anything I want when I’m writing on the board. I can also start singing for absolutely no reason (example: Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song), and they shut up and all pay rapt attention to me. Does Will Smith have anything to do with simple present tense? Probably not. Does he keep me from falling asleep while teaching it? Yes ma’am.