A poster I created to help get students in the mood for learning the second conditional: “If I won a million pounds I’d…” (the building featured houses about 5 classrooms that we teach in).

Wah. Shatterficated. That’s what I be.

We’re now almost half way through CELTA. The pace hasn’t let up at all, really is intense.

I’ve found that I need to get in to uni for about 8am most days, after doing my Willyaki deliveries. Lunchtimes are pretty much taken up by lesson planning, so it’s basically non-stop input and output all day; we are finishing by about 6pm most days now though which is nice.

For the first week, we were basically spoon-fed our lesson material. We’d write our plans with our tutors. This week however, we’re just told what subject to teach, and pointed in the direction of what we might find useful. Next week it’ll all just be left to us.

Last night, after four hours planning for today’s one-hour lesson, I was thinking about how much longer it’s taking me to prepare for lessons here than it did in Japan. The main reason for this is that if we are not careful to meet all the criteria, our lessons (which are observed by three other trainees and our tutor) will be failed (and quite a few people have been failed. I had a near-miss in today’s grammar class teaching the second conditional, but thankfully just managed to pull it off). Fails can be made up for in future classes.

In class, I find it really challenging to maintain awareness of everything going on around me whilst at the same time focusing upon my lesson aims and objectives, and providing clear grammatical explanations (my weak area). I feel I need a clone.

This afternoon whilst explaining the difference between would and could to an individual student who was struggling to create example sentences, I noticed that two students on another table had finished and were looking around with bored expressions.. not good (and of course picked up by my assessor). I find in those situations my brain actually splits in half through necessity – one half continuing to deal with the student in need of an explanation, and the other figuring out what mini-activity to distract the advanced types with (should be on the plan though if I’ve done it properly).

Overall however, classes are going well. My strong point is rapport with the students (at the end of today’s lesson a student announced to the class, ‘You will make a great teacher Joseph!”). My weak points: board work, keeping the pace going, grammar explanations.

Back in the classroom where we are the students, there’s been a lot to take in. Today we were looking at lesson sequencing (devising a plan that covers a series of lessons), and then later, integrating the four skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing). That was a lot of fun as we were set a ‘running dictation’ – a competitive race done in pairs – with one person writing, and the other running back and forth to a text stuck on the wall at the end of the hallway remembering and dictating the passage sentence by sentence. Very funny 🙂 We also learned more about the problems that learners face with English verbs, notably when ‘present’ and ‘past’ tense verbs are put to other uses.

Yesterday, we studied phonemes and were taught the phonetic alphabet. That was absolutely fascinating (I’m not kidding!). We also looked at how we physically create these sounds (what parts of the vocal gear we employ) – you know I never realised that the sound ‘d’ is an unvoiced ‘t’, that ‘j’ is an unvoiced ‘sh’.

Time and time again I’m staggered by the amount of stuff we know without even knowing it! The way I move all those muscles in order to produce the word ‘hello’ – and I can do that at the same time as walking up a flight of stairs, skillfully (and unconsciously) maintaining my balance through thousands of computations telling my body to move this way or that in response to input from my balance sensors. Just incredible how it all work. 

Also yesterday, we looked at study spaces (our group offered the IC’s CILASS Collab 2 as a model study space, adapting it to suit a deprived African village), and the use of technology / realia (that’s real ‘things’).

Other sessions this week have included ‘teacher talk’, materials development. assessing, and questioning – with such a variety (and at such a pace) I don’t find myself tuning out at all, no matter how shattered I am.

Oh, we received our first (grammar focused) written assignments back today, the ones we were warned that we probably wouldn’t pass first time. They were right – out of 16 of us, 13 failed! That’s ok though, it’s written into the plan. We now have the weekend to go through the incredibly detailed feedback and submit them a second time next week.

Anyway , almost halfway through the intensive course, I’d have no hesitation in recommending CELTA to anyone thinking of teaching English as a foreign / second language. And whilst I haven’t done the one-year version, I feel that this intense course is possibly more effective (maybe? Maybe not. OK, so they are different things really. Perhaps).