The Socratic Method

It used to be that it took me almost no time to do my lesson plans. Oral English just doesn't take a lot of work to plan out. Especially once I got the hang of what worked and what didn't lesson plans took maybe an hour at most. Sometimes I'd basically still be deciding what to do on my way to class. But now with all these lecture courses I probably spend at least four hours a week planning. My lesson plans have ballooned from maybe one full page to more than five. What really gets me is sometimes I don't know if all this extra planning really helps so much. I was preparing my lesson on Ancient Greece for this week and I got to the part about the Socratic Method, asking a lot of questions, and I realized that I was asking the students almost no questions this week. I'd like to think I'm getting better at these lectures, it's certainly getting easier for me to do them. But half the time I still have a hard time knowing exactly what is getting through to the students and why. I find a lot of this stuff interesting but that doesn't necessarily mean that they do or that I'm conveying it in an interesting way. I try to include more stories and questions with my history, but I still don't know. There are some classes where I can see that half the class is really engaged, but I just can't tell about the other half. My classes this semester are also a lot bigger than my ones last semester which makes checking up on all the students just that much more difficult. I've also been struggling with coming up for a topic for a speech I'm supposed to give this year. Last year I did sex education, and now I just can't find any way to follow that up. Or at least any way that won't get me kicked out of the country.