30 Minutes Before Class Starts, the Reality of My Lesson Plan

8:14 AM. On the Vancouver SkyTrain, thermal tumbler in one hand, phone in the other, furiously scrolling through Google Docs. Today's morning class topic is "Comparatives and Superlatives in Everyday Life," but I hate every single example sentence I made last night. I mean, I can't seriously read "This pizza is bigger than that pizza" in front of adult students with a straight face. So here I am, on the morning commute, scrapping all my examples and starting over.

This is the reality of my lesson plans.

On social media, I sometimes see photos of other ESL teachers' immaculate class materials. Boards organized with colour-coded sticky notes, laminated flashcards, Google Sheets with timelines planned down to the minute. I'm impressed when I see them, but also a little skeptical. Do you really do that every day? I could never. My lesson prep process is far messier than that, and honestly, a little embarrassing.

The World of Twenty-Three Tabs

The first thing I do when I start prepping is open browser tabs. The problem is I never close them. When I finished prepping for last Friday's class, I counted the tabs open in Chrome: twenty-three. Roughly reconstructed, here's what they were.

• Three ESL Library worksheet search pages (ended up using none of them)
• Five YouTube videos (started looking for listening material, somehow ended up watching a documentary about Vancouver street cats)
• Two Reddit r/TEFL posts
• Google search results for "how to explain present perfect to adults who already hate grammar"
• Four images saved for meme purposes

I bounce back and forth between these tabs, pasting notes into a Word document. There's no system whatsoever. I just copy and dump anything that seems decent, then organize it later. "Later" usually means one hour before class.

Memes Are Educational Materials (I Mean It)

I'm convinced that anyone who doesn't know the power of memes in an ESL classroom has never taught a proper class. Especially for intermediate and above adult learners, one well-chosen meme is far more effective than ten lines of grammar explanation.

For example, when teaching conditionals, instead of writing "If I had studied harder, I would have passed" on the board, I put the same sentence over a meme of a dog with a regretful expression. The students laugh, and as they laugh, the sentence structure sinks in. I don't know the theoretical basis for it, but from experience, it definitely works.

The problem is that finding the right meme takes way too much time. I once spent an hour picking memes for a 30-minute grammar activity. By then, the time I should've spent structuring the actual lesson is gone, and I end up frantically filling in the rest right before class. No school would call this "being well-prepared," but the students respond well, so I rationalize it as my own method.

A Single Sheet of Paper on the Laptop

Despite all my use of digital tools, the very last thing I do before class is analog. I pull out a sheet of A4 paper and scribble the class flow by hand. Handwriting no one else can read, a cryptic code of arrows, asterisks, and question marks that only makes sense to me.

It goes something like this. "Warm-up: weekend talk (5 min, cut it off if it drags)." One arrow below that, "Introduce comparatives, show meme." Another arrow, "Pair work, Worksheet B (Did I print this? CHECK!!!)." As the triple-underlined word "CHECK" suggests, forgetting to print happens at least once or twice a month. When it does, I rush to the school copier and stand in line, and more often than not, other teachers are in the exact same situation. There's a strange camaraderie in it.

This single sheet of paper is my actual lesson plan. The neat version in Google Docs is more like a record I fill in after class. Once class is over, I sit there thinking, "Okay, what did I actually do today?" and piece it together after the fact. The real class runs on this crumpled piece of paper.

Class Starts Even When It's Not Perfect

Sometimes a student throws out a question I never expected (I remember freezing when someone asked why the comparative of "fun" is "more fun" and not "funner"), and I'm reminded that no matter how much I prepare, teaching is live. I can open twenty-three tabs, pick out memes, scribble on paper, but the moment I open that classroom door, half of it is improvisation.

And yet somehow, it works out every time. That's kind of amazing to me, and I think that's why I keep doing this. Today, once again, I'm heading to the classroom, opening my eleventh tab on the commute, digging through the meme folder I saved yesterday, crumpling up my one-page memo as I go.