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Published: January 19th 2008
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School's out
Sunday is the busiest day for young learners. This is a view of from the main doors out onto the street, where all the moms and dads are waiting on motorbikes to pick up their kids as they come rushing out of the school. We were warned; they were right.
Halfway through CELTA, we concede that the training is as intense as the ILA school administration said it would be.
With lesson planning, class material preparation, teaching practice, assignment completion, classroom sessions and study time, we’re putting in solid 15+ hour week days—and time on Saturday/Sunday, too. We wake up 6:30 a.m., have breakfast (sometimes), go to school until 5:30 p.m., and then spend the entire evening doing the above mentioned tasks until midnight, sometimes later, just to keep up with all the work. We have assessed teaching practice every other day, for which you can receive a “not to standard,” “to standard,” or “above standard.” There are 15 trainees that have been split into three groups, and we are in different groups. We don’t teach on the same days, either, so every night is stressful for one of us. It’s not so bad, considering that we can help each other, like making class handouts or picking up dinner.
That desire to get ahead (perfectionist Marc and competitive Krysta) that we hoped to leave behind when we came to Vietnam has only resurfaced and, on some days, leads to great difficulty dealing
Excuse me, pardon me, coming through
Scaling the wall, we attempt to make it up the stairs at ILA after class lets out on a Sunday. We climb 30+ flights of stairs every day, and are becoming quite the stair masters. with the pressure. The good news is that we are both doing well in the course, in part because of our dedication to get an above standard overall grade, which would mean more options in terms of who, where and how often we would teach, in addition to better pay.
The intensity of our studies has been eased by our fellow trainees, which include eight English/Brits, four Americans, one Lebanese, and us two simple Canadian folks. To give some examples of the range of experiences in our cohort, there’s a sign language interpreter from Seattle; an English scuba diving instructor who’s been living in Egypt for the last six years; a 24-year-old professional poker player from England; a five-months pregnant Lebanese woman; an Englishman whose been running a resort in Thailand for the last three years; a 65-year-old recently retired English woman from Australia; and a handful of people with previous teaching experience in Asia. We really underestimated the value of meeting like-minded, yet diverse, people on our journey, and we look forward to meeting more.
We spend our afternoons in class together learning about various teaching frameworks, classroom management techniques, and language analysis (grammar, pronunciation, etc). The
Typical ILA classroom
We also have our classroom sessions as a group in a room like this, and yes, we have to sit in those ridiculous desks. Marc finally got fed up this week and switched to a chair. teaching practice, which we do every other morning for 40-60 minutes, is done on a group of students that pay a reduced fee because we are CELTA trainees. The days that we don’t teach, we observe other trainees within our group. There are three levels of students that we teach: elementary, pre-intermediate, and intermediate. They are all adults, but obviously have a range of abilities and skills, even within each level. Each trainee group teaches each class for just over a week. Between us, we’ve taught four or five classes each. For a few laughs, here’s a sample of what we’re teaching: Grammar: the first conditional; Lexis: verb+noun collocations; Functional Language: common exponents for making requests and asking permission; Receptive Skills: reading, listening or speaking. In addition, we are basically expected to memorize the phonemic chart (you know, those funny symbols in the dictionary) by the end of our training and be able to ramble off and illustrate all grammar rules, particularly tense. Seriously. Because of the traditional teaching methods in Vietnam, most of the students know significantly more about grammar than we do, even if they don’t have the vocabulary or pronunciation skills to put a proper sentence together.
Deserted hall
The school is quite modern, and they take good care of it. Once we finish, we’re planning to take a couple weeks to travel around Vietnam and check out some schools in other cities—ILA and other organizations, to see what kind of opportunities there are and where we want to set up shop for a while. Until then, we don’t have much to tell you about life in Saigon—just life as a CELTA trainee. It’s brutal, but it’s really only 1/16 of our journey, and there’s only two weeks left.
We miss you all,
Marc and Krysta
P.S. Josh - we think of you everyday, particularly in our pronunciation classes, because the most common phonemic symbol in the English language is called the shwa, which is an upside down “e.” You can imagine how we say it whenever it comes up, as if you were walking in the door, and we laugh every time.
P.P.S. Colin - tell Jill we met a guy who loves Bon Jovi as much as she does. His name is Vinh, and he's the one on the far left in the photo of Marc's class. I can get his e-mail address for her if she wants. His English isn't very good, though.
8 a.m. in District 3
View from the balcony of the cafe on the top floor of ILA. Much eating, smoking, and complaining about the course happens here among our classmates.
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Jill
non-member comment
I love it
Wow, sounds like you two are on an intense english journey. Krysta, i thought you knew all the phonemetic???sp. alphabet anyway. How's the vietnamese coming? ;)