Joe McVeigh

How much time do you spend preparing your lessons in advance? Are you a planner? Or do you like to let the lesson take its own course?
As a young student teacher I learned how to carefully plan my lessons. I would write out exactly what I planned to do during each part of the fifty-minute […]

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Have you ever taught a class that just never seemed to come together? Or one in which the students all worked together really well? Do you think that classes have their own personalities?
I first learned about the concept of class chemistry as a student teacher. My master teacher, a wonderful woman named Martha Bean, commented […]

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We’ve been having a heat wave in Vermont, in the northeastern United States where I live. The temperature has reached 95° F (35° C). It’s actually hotter here than it was in Saudi Arabia when I visited in the spring. It got me thinking about the effect of heat and other discomforts on our classes […]

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One of my most memorable teachers was a high school English teacher. Thomas Donovan had been teaching for nearly forty years and was in his sixties when I had him as a 14-year-old student. He was what today we would call “old school.” That is, he was very traditional in the way […]

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A recent thread on the TESOL English as a Foreign Language Interest Section e-list discussion group raised the issue of teaching conversation in the EFL classroom. I came up with the following list of useful books for those interested in teaching speaking.
Folse, K. S. (2006) The art of teaching speaking: Research and pedagogy for ESL/EFL […]

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