For the record, the above statement is gramatically incorrect and we shouldn't use it. That's unfortunate. It's one I actually use quite a bit. So suck it, English language. I'm sticking with it. And I'm loving it.
Know what else I'm loving? My CELTA course! I know I say this every time, but my classmates really are fantastic. We're coming out of our shells more and more, and we have some really funny people in this world. Quick thinkers. Example: today when Brian, our Scotsman, was teaching, one of the students told him that he scared them, because of his accent and the quickness of his speech. I would've been taken aback, but no, not Brian. He fired right back: "Well, you scare me." BOOM. I was shaking from laughing so hard while trying not to make a sound. Second example: (background first: our tutors like to tell us not to do things when we teach because we'd be opening a can of worms, and we don't want to do that to ourselves) during our afternoon session, our tutor asked us what else came in cans besides Coca-Cola. We're all listing things like soup and vegetables and then Alec casually says, "worms." We almost didn't catch it, but then our tutor did a little double take and his clever mischief was discovered. We all had a healthy laugh about that one too. Come to think about it, laughter is one thing that we're all really good at, and we laugh a lot. So even though the course is intensive and we're there for at least eight hours a day, it doesn't feel as bad as it good because we've got nice light and fun attitudes about it.
By today I've had an official hour of observed teaching practice, 20 minutes yesterday and 40 today. I was more nervous yesterday, I think just because it was the first day and I always put a pressure on myself to do above and beyond well. The lessons for both days did go off decently, although my students the first day were a bit unruly. Today's session was much better in that way...we had 5 women who are all interested in learning but could be directed more easily than the 8 students we had the day before.
Let me paint a picture of today's class for you. We've got a group of students who basically get free lessons for putting up with our training in progress; they pay a deposit of 100 pesos and if they show up to 80% of our sessions, they get their money back at the end. They're all pretty funny...since our class is in the middle of the morning, from 9:30 to 11:30, most of our students don't work, or at least not regularly. So picture a room of middle-aged women and the token male (named Octavio) who likes to ask us girls awkward questions about boyfriends and succeeds in making us very uncomfortable somehow. It's fun. Today, we had 5 women: Dolly, Ana Maria, Mirta, Yoon, and Renee (see, I remember their names!). There are three of us slated to teach each day, and while one works with the students, the rest of us in our group of six are seated in the back watching and writing down our observations. Aminah went first today, then Brian (with the lovely escapade you read about earlier), and then me. I woke up feeling pretty confident, and I wasn't nervous at all, so I was able to enjoy my lesson. Our topic was horoscopes, and we had to talk about them in the context of a magazine article that we read about how some employers look up the star signs of potential hires to learn about their personalities and decide whether or not they'd be good candidates for the job. You may be impressed, but don't be: at this point, all of our lessons and exercises are coming out of a workbook. Each week we have more freedom and expectation to come up with our own stuff, until finally in week four we plan the entire lesson from scratch. Our class is at a pre-intermediate level, but we were able to have some good discussions about horoscopes and their validity, and I felt that it went really well overall. In our follow-up feedback session, it turned out that my classmates and our tutor shared my view of the lesson, which was encouraging, but I also got some good reminders and suggestions from everyone.
After this input session, we're given an hour for lunch, and return to the school at 2 pm for our afternoon instruction sessions, where one of our tutors walks us through types of example lessons and gives us more skills to add to our teaching arsenal. This takes us till 5 pm, and then it's either time to head home or time to get going on the lesson plan for the next day. Thus passes every day of the week for us. The number of hours and amount of information that we cover makes for a long day, but for now I'm enjoying it. I'm turning into a teacher!
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