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Passion vs safety in career choices

This B2 ESL lesson explores the dilemma of choosing a career path based on passion versus security. Students engage in discussions, learn key vocabulary, comprehend a video, practice second and third conditionals, and culminate in a role-play advising a friend.

B2 Work Lifestyle Video
Passion vs safety in career choices
Photo by Brendan Church / Unsplash

Summary

This downloadable PDF lesson plan for English teachers helps B2 students discuss career choices. The class material covers vocabulary, grammar, and a role-play activity to explore the dilemma between following your passion and choosing a safe, dependable job.

This ESL lesson centers on a video about choosing between a passionate and a safe career path. Students begin with a warm-up discussion before learning key vocabulary. After watching the video and answering comprehension questions, they practice the new words and review second and third conditionals. The lesson culminates in a structured role-play where students debate the pros and cons of each career path, using newly learned phrases for discussion and debate to advise a friend at a career crossroads.

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Activities

  • A vocabulary and video comprehension activity where students learn and practice advanced vocabulary like 'onerous,' 'penury,' and 'mastery' through a matching exercise and a contextual gap-fill, followed by watching a short video debating the merits of a safe career versus a passionate one and answering comprehension questions.
  • A grammar practice section providing a clear explanation of the second and third conditional forms, allowing students to solidify their understanding by completing sentences related to hypothetical past and present career decisions.
  • A dynamic speaking and role-play activity where students advise a friend on a career choice, using provided phrases for debate to argue for either financial security or following one's passion, putting new language into practice.
00:05 When it comes to deciding what to do with our lives, we are frequently presented with what looks like a very painful choice: the passionate path vs the safe path.
00:19 The latter involves the slow mastery of a dependable profession; we will be bored - but we know we'll never be fired.
00:25 Meanwhile, the former is a high-wire act in which we fantasise generating an income from what we deeply love and yet we constantly fear penury and humiliation.
00:41 The choice can feel acute, but it may be less so than it seems, once we properly explore the concept of safety.
00:47 We are never properly safe so long as we are doing something we hate or are pursuing out of cowardice.
00:54 In the deeply competitive conditions of modernity, our back-up career - the one we adopt out of fear - will be someone else's central ambition.
01:07 Our plan B will be someone else's plan A, which places us at an immediate disadvantage in terms of the energy and focus we are able to muster. The 'safe' choice might ruin us.
01:22 By contrast, what we love is what we are obsessed by anyway, we'd do it for free - which decisively increases our chances of mastery while reducing the price of failure.
01:39 A decade of mixed results on a passion-project is inherently less onerous than unspectacular returns for a whole career in a hateful field.
01:47 It is in the end not very safe to use the one life we have forcing ourselves to do what we know from the outset we won't enjoy - simply in order to keep living. This isn't safety; it's masochism.
02:03 We may all have to spend our first two decades suffering through the education system; but at some point, we are allowed to leave school.
02:14 At some point, we need to have a shot at answering what life could be about beyond obedience and timidity.
02:22 It is not very common to have a passion; most of us don't. Yet if we are blessed enough to have one, we are risking far more than we should by failing to heed its call.

Vocabulary focus

The vocabulary in this lesson is focused on career dilemmas and personal qualities. Students will learn and use words such as penury, onerous, muster, timidity, dependable, heed, cowardice, and mastery. These terms are crucial for discussing the challenges and rewards of choosing a career path based on passion versus security.

Grammar focus

The grammar focus is on the second and third conditionals. This is essential for the lesson's theme, as it allows students to discuss hypothetical situations about career choices, both in the present/future (If I were you, I would...) and in the past (If I had taken that job, I would have...).

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