So long and good bye. I used some of your lessons. They were high quality.

Hope you drop by waygook from time to time even after you settle in your new destination.

Have you ever sat down and thought about how many students you teach each week with your lessons? I teach 800 students a week. If there are 99 other teachers who download the same lesson, and each of those teachers presents said lesson in the same week to ~800 students, you are teaching ~120,000 students! That is f'n incredible.  Your [PRANKS] lesson was downloaded more than 700 times the last time I checked, so in all fairness, the number of students you teach is probably way more than my sorry excuse for an estimate. The pranks lesson may have taught more than half a million students across Korea! Legendary, my friend. Thank you for all your hard work. I will echo the many other teachers on this site who have said, 'Thank you for all your hard work!' It is most appreciated!

I did, but my estimate is not nearly as optimistic. My total lesson download count on Waygook is somewhere between 7 to 8000. I wrote down the total downloads of my lessons before I switched them over to my private server (it was about 6500 at that time and Mediafire tells me I've had about 500 downloads in addition and this thread alone has another 200 in the last 6 hours). I figure maybe 10% of downloaders actually use the lesson (I mean, I downloaded lessons just to look at them, but ended up using very few). In addition, very few teachers have the freedom to teach these lessons to all of their students. Many use them for afternoon classes only, or for a single grade. So, I think the average number of students taught per lesson is probably closer to 200.
So, according to this logic:
8000 x .1 x 200 = 160,000ish
This isn't a per week estimate, but a total estimate.

Anyways, this is in fact one of the things that kept me motivated. It was the only metric by which I could quantitatively gauge my "success". But really, those are just numbers and really only tell me about distribution. I much preferred the teacher feedback after having taught the lesson. 

So, I think, to best contribute to this site, please keep giving useful and encouraging feedback to the other contributors! It really does mean a lot!

Cheers

I think there are very few lessons I have found that are as well thought out as yours. Leo I think you should also consider that you have taught teachers who download your lessons too. A raw number does not equal success. I say this because generally I don't use other people's lessons, but I find myself always borrowing from yours.

Thanks for your help.

Thanks for that Orange. It made my day!

Leo, thank you for the well thought out lessons.  You have some great ideas.

I'd just like to add a notice for anyone downloading them (in my case, a Day in Canada).  These lessons can be specific to Leo's life experiences.  The lesson "A Day in Canada" is more or less a day in Leo's life in high school. So you should be prepared to go through the lesson with a fine tooth comb to make the needed changes. I spent over an hour changing pictures, facts, and questions. It's turning out to be a great lesson, but don't think that you can just download this and present it within 15 minutes.

ps.
Just to let you know Leo, kids in Canada these days never have homework either.  Back in our days it was common to be given assignments to take home, but this trend of no homework is also rampant in Canada today.  Actually, giving homework was NOT ALLOWED during one of my placements in a London Ontario school board. Crazy eh?

Seriously? I'm not really sure if that's a good change or bad. I'd have to see how the rest of the curriculum has changed. I was never really a big fan of worksheet type homework, though I do think assigned readings to be necessary and group projects that require meetings outside of school hours to be hugely beneficial. That's very surprising to hear. Hmm...

Long term projects were the exception, I think.  What I wasn't allowed to do was assign readings or questions to be done on their own time.

So can you guess how we read novels in English class?  Yep. Right there in the class.  I have to admit, it made my planning much easier. I had to include 15-20 minutes of reading in each lesson.  It was a joke.

Keep in mind that my school was deemed "tough". Lots of low income families, drug problems, foster kids, etc.  I also worked in a school in a smaller community in North Ontario that allowed homework... but it was very rare and the students always complained as if it was a great injustice. Some teachers don't even bother anymore.

Well, it may just be a sign of the times. Kids these days probably don't have the patience to read on their own time, so province had to resort to forced reading time in class. Btw, don't the provinces all have a certain amount of autonomy? I mean, when I was in high school, the exams were all provincial, and I assume, so was the curriculum. It may be that Ontario has taken the lead in this regard (wouldn't be surprising).

Honestly though, if kids are becoming rowdy and unruly, I mostly blame the education system. Kids are being raised in an increasingly fast paced, high intensity, dynamic, multi-tasking world what with them being half raised by video games, the internet and multi-media devices. Unfortunately, pedagogy and education related technological advances have only improved at a snail's pace. There is a great divide between how kids are stimulated outside of school and inside. It has always been there, but it has been increasing at a pace never before seen in human history. It is a great injustice. I don't really know how it can be fixed, but I know that every succeeding generation will become more and more disillusioned by schooling until some great reform takes place. I wouldn't mind seeing homework being replaced by greater emphasis on social, group, kinaesthetic, vocational, democratic and self-directed type studying activities.

Leo, thank you so much for posting your lessons. As a newbie to SoKo and to this kind of work I've been finding lesson planning and teaching quite daunting. Your lessons have gone down very well, and have helped me make a good impression with my students and co-teachers :) Thanks again!