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Published: August 7th 2010
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It's been an awfully long and hard week. If I had to recap, it would sound something like this:
very little sleep, very much drama. My TP (Teaching Practice) 4 on Tuesday the 3rd on
Grammar Practice - Present Perfect + Past Simple was hectic! My tutor actually put the word
'wired' in my TP feedback. Tried to do a zillion activities in 30 minutes. Students enjoyed my
'Pass the orange' game and all other activities, so I was pretty happy with myself. The only problem I had going through all the stages of a grammar lesson was the fact that we did not get any TP notes, which meant that we were basically thrown to the wolves! So as I know my grammar well and love it to bits, I wanted to make a point and teach loads of things in just half an hour. Which did not impress anybody. I mean, the feedback from fellow trainees was great, as I had all sort of fun activities, from the
warmer til the
mingling free practice at the end. But I wanted to do so much in so little time, that I just rushed everybody through a dozen activities!! The funny
bit is that somehow, miraculously, they seemed to work! 😊 Thumbs up I guess. My tutor said she'd never seen me so
'wired' and I got a Very Good for
knowledge of TL ( target language) and confidence.
I didn't sleep a wink on Wed night. I stayed up til 2 looking for an
'authentic text' to meet the requirements: pre-int level, interesting topic, nice, fun follow-on activity on the same topic. Bullocks! My research didn't get me anywhere. I was seeking something mind-blowing, I wanted a show-stopper and I ended up with nothing. I went through every imaginable topic, from Mata Hari to horoscope, and nothing good came out of it. I literally cried myself to sleep, set up my alarm for 6am and after getting no more than 4 hours sleep I rushed to the station, got myself the commuter's
Metro and
Take a Break magazine and hopped on the train to Earl's Court. Got there at 8 o'clock. As the school hadn't opened yet, I just sat down in the next-door coffee place and started editing my lesson plan right then and there. The article I chose for my reading class was about a lady who
died of cancer. Quite a sad story and truthfully, not very appealing for my age group students. 18 to 32y.o. blokes spending an hour on reading about some nice, middle-aged lady dying of cancer. I know the text was not the most appropriate, but I had no choice. The vocab was easy, I had to pre-teach lexis of about 6 words, which was ok and come up with questions for gist reading and detailed reading which I did in the blink of an eye. Later on I went upstairs and printed out pictures and finished up the lesson plan. Unbelievably, my students liked it. The lead-in activity was chatting about students' happiest experiences which set the tone and they carried on enjoying answering the questions and looking out for the tricky ones. The feedback from fellow
Celta trainees was great, as always. Apart from the topic, my tutor seemed to appreciate the effort and the fact that I got all the students actively engaged.
On Wed I had to go to
South Kensington to
Language Link there and observe an experienced teacher. Great stuff happening! John (that's the name of the teacher I watched) had actually improvised a 3
hour class making it clear to me that
'in life sometimes these things happen'. I could see it right from the start, as he got in 10 minutes late and carried on chit-chatting for the next 10 about the 'last time I felt breathless and sweaty'. And that's just because a student asked him if he had been running. He delivered a great 3-hour class with NO materials or resources whatsoever. While students were pair-working, he explained that this was his daily pattern: 1 h recycling ( checking things previously taught), 1 h presentation ( actual teaching) and 1 h working on skills. Things did not go exactly to plan, but students ended up working a lot on drilling on Modal perfects which was great, doing individual, pair-work and mingling activities, listening to a song and basically interacting a lot. John felt the need to explain that he was doing a Master's and was busy with his dissertation and sometimes he had to teach even 11 h/ day to cover for somebody missing. etc. It's true and I totally see where he's coming from.
Wed morning - 9.00 am to be more accurate- goes down in my course history
for ta-ta......: my first
TUTORIAL!! I had a 10-minute tutorial with Ali just to check how things were going and how I was coping with everything on the course. Everything ok, as I'd imagined.😊
Fri 5.00 pm- the end of my second week on the course. I met my
'case study' after class, Nerijus. a 32 y.o. Lithuanian bloke whose English I need to assess for the purpose of writing my second assignment.
It's Friday night now...or early Saturday morning, 01:35, I gotta sleep, so good-night.
Take care and stay tuned. Two more weeks til the end of this intensive
Celta course.
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