Knowing your students video · Teacher Support Network (Free)

Knowing your students video

I'm taking a look at this video and find myself feeling bad about recently losing a client because I did not know him well enough, and pushed him a little too hard and he panicked and ended the lessons.

This was absolutely not a linguistic issue; it had to do with the anxiety provoked when trying to speak English in conversation. The first half of our lessons were always me talking him down from the anxiety that I think was largely provoked by his perfectionism, and I had to continually emphasize that there is no perfect communication so he needed to accept that he could make mistakes but still communicate what he needed to communicate. Unfortunalely I misjudged this on one occasion and his anxiety was provoked in a way that he found unbearable, and so I lost a client and my guess is that he has abandoned English altogether :(x2

I'm currerntly floundering a bit with another client, but now am getting down on paper exactly what I know about his needs (probably still not enough) after about 10 hours of lessons together, and am going to try to apply the info in this video to our situation and see if I can be as precise as possible about it. Both of these guys are my "target audience" if that's the right phrase, though I also need to be more precise about what that means.

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