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Lesson

Teachers are generally required, or at least advised, to have a lesson plan ready before starting a class. Methodology is the academic discipline dealing with the appropriate theories, means and methods which help teachers build their lessons and get their message across. While external factors such as the student-teacher ratio must be taken into consideration, methodological investigations very often focus on explaining, and definitely aim at increasing, students' motivation in the face of difficulties caused by the rigid school system. In this context, one basic point of criticism concerns the very idea of lessons – the fact that a typical school day consists of a sequence of, say, 45 minute units where even small children have to switch again and again from one "subject" to the next.

In a wider sense, a lesson is an insight gained by a learner into a hitherto unfamiliar subject-matter. Such a "lesson" can be either planned or accidental, enjoyable or painful. ("He learned his lesson the hard way.") When people teach someone a lesson, they punish or scold them for a mistake they have made in order to ensure that they do not make the same mistake again.

The word lesson comes from Latin lectio "the action of reading (out)". From there, the word was also used for the text itself, very often a passage from the Bible read out during a religious service ("first lesson", "second lesson"). Finally, any portion of a book to be studied was referred to as a lesson.

See also

• Music lesson for a particular type of lesson
• The Tango Lesson (a 1997 movie)
• Ivan Illich for a critique of institutionalised learning
• School and university in literature for fiction depicting individual lessons
• http://teachers.net/lessons/ (a place where teachers can swap lesson plans)