Ordinary jobs...with a tweak
Topics: Business English - jobs - duties and responsibilities - motivation
Level: B1 / B2
Skills: Speaking and Reading
Link to article: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/13/experience-im-a-professional-chef-in-antarctica
Aims:
To make predictions before reading an article
To read for gist and for detail
To give one's opinion about different kinds of jobs
To choose a follow-up task according to students' interests and needs
Use of language & lexis:
To use different tenses to talk about jobs
To learn / review adjectives to describe jobs
To work on some contextualized lexis from the article
Great post — what a creative and inspiring way to make ordinary jobs exciting! After work my brain is fried. Bus Traffic Fever asks just enough of me to feel like a win, and bustrafficfever picks up the slack on fried-brain days.
It is brilliant to see such creative ELT lesson ideas, especially when it comes to sparking genuine conversation in the classroom. Taking familiar occupations and adding an unexpected twist is a fantastic way to push students beyond basic vocabulary and get them using second-conditional structures and complex adjectives naturally. Applying a peel paragraph structure to student writing tasks helps learners organize their thoughts clearly, making their arguments far more persuasive when justifying these quirky job roles. I'm quite curious to know if you've tried running this activity with lower-level groups, or if you find it works best with intermediate students who already have a bit more vocabulary to play with. Thanks for sharing such a fun and adaptable resource!
These days there’s so much quality content on Instagram reels, and using an instagram reel downloader helps me save the videos that actually matter to me. It’s a simple but effective way to keep everything accessible.