CELTA-Week Eight

Hey guys and gals!

Here’s what went on this week (I only have two weeks left after this):

Day 15:

So today I had my seventh teaching practice.

DISASTER.

I crashed and burned so hard it wasn’t even funny.

I was doing relative clauses, which on paper seem straight forward enough, but to teach they’re a nightmare-especially when you only have forty minutes! Oh God, it was terrible. They just weren’t getting it and I had to keep moving on in order to meet my criteria for the lesson plan stages.

To make matters worse, we had an official assessor from Cambridge come down and observe our lessons! No pressure or anything!

I don’t want to sound cocky or anything like that, but up until now I’ve been doing really well in my teaching, so naturally I was a bit upset with this lesson. However, my tutors were really nice about it, telling me that relative clauses are a b**** to teach across the board. In fact, the assessor lady came up to me after our feedback session and told me that if she was a CELTA tutor, she would never assign somebody relative clauses for their teaching practice. So they told me just to see it as a blip, learn from it, and don’t see it as the be all, end all in terms of my final grade.

In the afternoon, we just had a short session with the Cambridge lady. She asked how we were getting on in the course, gave us some teaching tips and some advice for getting work afterwards.

Day 16:

I was only observing classes today, thank goodness! Everybody did a great job which was really nice to see.

In the afternoon, we were handed back our ‘Language Related Tasks’ assignment (I passed-yay!).

After that, we had a class on types of examinations and testing, followed by a class about one-to-one teaching.

That’s all folks for this week!

Thanks for reading,

Louise