Friday - Easy day

Today our first session was dedicated to Future, more specifically modality. We filled in some predictions with will and then did some back to front chaining for drilling. We also dealt with future perfect. Then we played Future Tense dominos. I sometimes regret not taking enough notes, because at that moment I think I write a lot and then some time passes and I can hardly recollect what those notes were about..pretty sad..my memory is letting me down.

The second session was basically watching a Listening Lesson DVD, which was more than boring, it was absolutely impossible to watch and by the end almost all of us would rather lie only floor and sleep without any pillows and blankets than continue the day.

I have to prepare my lesson for Monday, as well as second assignment which is Learner-based. Of course, I will do all of this on Sunday, what is more, it will be Sunday evening or night..or maybe even midnight..

Week 2 - Somehow calm Thursday

Today and tomorrow I am celebrating temporary freedom from all the lesson-related stress, but I guess next week will be double-trouble as I have to deliver a lesson 3 times. Today I resubmitted my assignment and also had a tutorial. I have not heard anything about the former yet, but the latter was fair enough.

We talked about reading in our first session and all the terminology like activating schemata, eliciting and so on. Manana gave us a very nice lead-in. She basically turned the reading text into a ball and asked us to read as many things from it as possible, but...without touching it. It was pretty efficient, though. We were also introduced to our third assignment which is due on Monday, Week 4. All the assignments are getting worse and worse..I absolutely hate them, but ok, I do recognise they are useful so I should force myself to work on them obviously.

The second session was basically dedicated to watching a DVD lesson of some kind of Jonathan who did pretty well by the way. I do hope that I will integrate some of his techniques in my own lesson.
Today I observed teachers in the second group, which is pre-intermediate and of course, this is another stress factor..changing groups.. getting to know new people, even more, remembering their names!

I don't want to do this anymore, I'd rather be a cat 

Week 2 - Wednesday and deleted lesson plan

Probably this was the worst day so far and hopefully by the end of the course, it will remain so. The main reason is that I wrote my lesson plan and procedure at 2 a.m. but it seems that I forgot to save the procedure and at one point *word went blank so I had to restart it thinking I had saved everything. Alas, I was wrong.. So then, as my brain was not working anymore, I decided to get some sleep and set my alarm clock at 5 a.m. at which time I woke up and did another lesson plan. That was awful. I was not even focusing on making it appropriate as long as I had something presentable.

Anyway, I went to the sessions. It all started with presentation about different ways of error correction, while session two was all about tenses and aspects. It was highlighted that tense does not equal to time and we had to deal with conveying meaning.

After lunch, mine was the first lesson and above that, it had to last for 60 minutes. As if I had not been delivering 2-hour lessons at British council already and in previous workplaces. I felt tense, but at the same time I am already so overloaded with everything happening around me that I just thought: OK, whatever, I don't really care.

This lesson focused on Reading and usage of Used to and Would, which I think was pretty successfully delivered. Manana told me that the drilling stage was still not enough and as well as that, I should have tried to elicited more than given them the correct answers straight away. Still more needs to be done with ICQs and giving shorter instructions.

I do believe that I can do much better but somehow I really can't do anything else at this point. I have improved a lot already and I guess at any stage in my life I would have the same obstacles to prevent me from dedicated my entire time to CELTA. I am so used to multi-tasking that I guess I would not be able to only ONE thing EVER, ever. 

I guess I need a couple of these, or no, maybe tens or hundreds..or thousands???

Week 2-Tuesday-I don't want any of this anymore

The second week started and the very beginning was not that bad, but today I seem to have lost all the courage and motivation I had had. I keep thinking about how my life will be boring as always after this course finishes, most probably with the same problems, obstacles and difficulties and how nothing will change with this certificate, whether I get it or not, which grade I get and so on. I really don't want to fall too deep in these thoughts but at this point, I would go to sleep even without making a lesson plan and fail it all through..

Of course, this is not what I will do actually (however much I want to)..Anyway, today we had the first session with Manana, who talked about supplementary materials. Manana brought some books, put them on the floor, we picked one and decided what good points the book had. Then we had to mingle and sell the book to at least 3 other people, while they had to sell maximum 3 books to us. The activity was quite fun.

Afterwards, we focused on learners as our 2nd assignment is already learner-based. In fact, as I hear the word assignment, I get nauseous, as today I discovered that I have to resubmit the first one again because of my stupid absent-mindedness..although it is fully my fault and I am really angry at myself, I find it very hard to find in myself enough power to deal with all of this, for the first time or again. I am truly fed up..I need my sleep most of all, as at most times I am acting like a robot.

During the second session, Nick talked about different learning styles, we were given a questionnaire to define ours and it appeared that I am a mixture of all the three - Visual, Auditory as well as kinaesthetic. I most probably agree with this, because I would not be able to take one as a preferred style for me. Then we had to talk more about how to develop each skill.

I had to leave the peers' lessons for about one hour as I picked up my passport from the Embassy of Latvia, which issues visas for Hungary. When I came back, it was feedback time already and I found out about the assignment and I became extra-disappointed and I just want to have a bit more courage to deal with all of those for 2,5 more weeks..

I can't even do this..What a misery..

Week 2 - nerve- racking Monday

This is the beginning of week two and Monday was as stressful as it might have been. I had to prepare an assignment by 9am and I only dedicated one hour to it yesterday, at midnight. Feeling sure enough, I printed it out in the morning, again waking up at 7 o'clock and finding out that it was snowing outside. Well, it does not actually snow in Tbilisi but this snowy-rainy-muddy THING actually got on my nerves.

Today, our trainers were swapped and Manana was supposed to supervise us on our lesson and also give a feedback. I do not know exactly why but I have been panicking since morning. The first session was about delivering Listening lesson. Manana prepared one about different types of holidays, we had to first list them and then create a holiday for her as if she was a tourist from abroad. Then we listed the stages we had used starting from warm up and finishing with feedback.

Nick's session was dedicated to functional language this time. He gave us papers with particular tasks and we had to mingle to complete them. For instance, my paper said: express annoyance with your partner. So, I had to somehow become angry at every person who I met at a "party". We talked a lot about function itself and function component as well, trying to elicit as many examples as possible and then also working on a lot of contexts.

...and then it began. I was shivering all over, I could not really help myself at this point, especially that I was the third one to deliver the lesson and I had to listen to others for almost 1.5 hours. Finally, I had my turn with vocabulary and it went well enough, although I had to panic once or twice.

My feedback was also pretty positive. Now the only thing I wonder about is the assignment hoping that I will get a pass because otherwise I can not imagine working on it again, I have no more energy left.

Day 5 - End of the first week

I can't totally believe that I made through the first week. A quarter of all the torture has finished, but it is just the beginning. I don't really know who to trust,though - those who claim that the first week is the most difficult as it is the adaptation period, or those who say that the first week is just an introduction and it gets tougher and tougher with time.. one way or another, I will still have to find it out myself in the following weeks, so I will stop guessing right here, right now.

Anyway, the day started with Manana teaching grammar. First, she showed us pictures of Audrey Hepburn and Angelina Jolie. She asked a few questions about their life, then she gave us mixed strips of papers to define which piece of information was related to which actress. After we had done this in pairs, she made us stick them on board, in two columns and the other group had to correct the mistakes. This was eliciting of Past simple/Present Perfect tenses. Afterwards, she drilled pronunciation with us and gave true/false handouts to circle correct grammatical forms. Free practice was to imagine we were famous actresses and think about our biography so that the others could ask us questions.

Anyway, session 2 started in a way that made me laugh until I cried. Nick drew something on the board that I tried to illustrate in photoshop. Yes, this is a completely new version of hangman, well at least for me and I just loved it. With this, he illustrated phonology and then continued drilling pronunciation. We had to do a Maze game/activity in pairs, it was based on stress.

Basically, these were the main points of the day. Another, more exciting detail was looking in my CELTA 5 and discovering the feedback for week 1. I felt so good and again so stressed because I have to keep it up the next weeks and I don't know how much strength I have left after all these sleepless nights. Even today, I have to prepare my lesson plan for Monday, because then I have to also work on the first assignment, which I guess will be not less than a nightmare.

Day 4 - excited but concerned

Being excited and worried at the same time is perhaps one of the worst things that might happen to a person. Worried about not being able to keep to the standard and fall behind..

Anyway, everything started at about 7 am when I had to wake up to be at IH at 8 am. The course starts at 9am, but as I had my second lesson today and therefore I had to print out some handouts, I decided to avoid long queues or some other technical problems and actually arrived the earliest. The day started with Manana as usual as she gave us some handouts with some names and surnames and asked us to find 2 people with the same names and the other two with the same family name while being at a so-called "party". It appeared that all of us had very similar names, like Jan, Jam, Jim and surnames - Bird, Beard, Baird etc. I could find mine in about 2-3 minutes and it became clear that we would talk about phonemes.

We were given a handout with a list of phrases - intonation, weak form, phoneme, diphthong etc and first we had to elicit the meanings ourselves, while next we received the matching definitions. Afterwards, we played a very nice alphabet game with flashcards. We said the sounds first /I/, /a:/ and then Manana threw all the papers on the floor. We had to pick as many as we could and create words with them which led to the creation of a poster with the phonemic script of the words we came up with.

Nick arrived for the second session and told us to write 3 words - jeopardize, partisan and rickety. We had to elicit spelling, stress, phonemic symbols and meaning. We tried to elicit information on the board under Meaning, Form, Pronunciation and Usage. Then we were told a story about Vietnam,where Nick used to live. He talked about how he went somewhere with his bike and got a splurtifer (mud) on his face and then he was fanoogled (frustrated). So, after he set context using his personal experience, he elicited information using CCQs, then we had drilling and board work.
Still, the most action-packed was the end of the activity when Nick stated that both above-mentioned words were from his imagination and they actually did not exist. It came as a shock as I had almost already memorized these absolutely useless words. Anyway, it means that Nick's lesson was efficient.
At the end, we were made to give the meaning of the words and check understanding with CCQs.

Lunch break arrived, 1 hour before my lesson. Well, basically an hour and 40 minutes because I was supposed to be the second this time, but still although I had prepared lesson plan, cover and Language Analysis and handed it in before 9am, I had not written scripts for myself, so I had to do in during the break. Anyway, half an hour rushed and it appeared that I had only 30 minutes to jot down exactly what I was doing. I was specially concerned about giving instructions and using appropriate language as these were my main aims for today. I managed to finalise this on time.

The lesson itself went smoothly, the Ss seemed to be engaged and interested in the activities. And again, straight after it finished, I became even more nervous about the feedback. During the session, Nick pasted some positive and negative feedback on the boards and asked us to identify our strengths and weaknesses. Then, he gave us comments individually and I found out that he liked my lesson so much, he hardly had any remark to make. This time, I have to focus more on eliciting the instruction and also jotting down some noted while monitoring.

I am more than happy and excited but at the same time I feel very concerned about the fact that I have more responsibility and it will add up as time goes by. For Monday, we also have to prepare the first assignment (+I have to deliver my third lesson). Tough weekend it approaching I guess.