Term Begins

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Teaching

Teaching started half way through September for me, I have lessons 8am-10am every weekday - horrible for me! but I'm getting used to it. The whole campus echoes with music at 6.30am every morning anyway for 1hr - the campus wide wakeup call and morning exercises, so sleeping in would probably be difficult anyway I suppose... 😞 Teaching is good though, I managed to get over my 'standing up at the front talking and everyone watching me' extreme nerves in the first 10 minutes and no probs from there. It helps that I know what I'm talking about - since I'm mostly just teaching them to talk - i.e. English oral & listening. I have 4 classes and I teach each of them twice a week for 2hrs a lesson. 3 masters classes, who are mostly around my age and one PhD class who are mostly about a decade older than me, which makes this lesson a little more awkward to teach, but I'm getting by. lots of group and pair exercises to get them talking as much as possible etc. Foster (across the hall) has been teaching these classes for 2yrs now so is alot of help giving me lesson plan ideas which is great. Andrew is teaching the same amount of hrs as me but has alot more prep to do as he's teaching undergrad English majors, writing & media studies. He also managed to get given a masters class to teach, teaching them English language teaching methodology - i.e. teaching them teaching methodology. Really difficult for him as this is his first yr teaching and some of them have been teaching for 5 yrs!...but he has a textbook and he has ideas so he's managing. We're now 4 weeks in and have just had our October holiday - not another till January now :s.

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