It was a stressful day for me and my fellow students as we had two very important tasks to complete by 5:00pm. (1) We had to do our interview of a foreign student and, as I mentioned in my notes on yesterday's events, I chose Lars, a young man from Germany. (2) Our first official teacher practice.
Well much to my surprise and that of my fellow students all went exceptionally well. Each of our individual interviews was completed pretty much without a hitch. My interview in particular was great. Lars told me about studying in Germany and how there is a term called "ginglish" or something there about where Germans will incorporate portions of a German word or phrase and portions of an English word or phrase and make something totally new. Why, he's not sure, just that they do it and it annoys him. He was articulate and very animated and seemed so happy to have me interview him and I was grateful he answered all the questions so thoroughly. He even had to write a paragraph of what he did last night and he wrote about how he went to a pub and learned to do Irish step dancing and he and his fellow students are beginning to feel very Irish. It doesn't hurt that he has a fake ID that says he's 18 and not 16 so I am sure he enjoyed a few pints in between dance steps.
It was most surprising to my group (Group B) that our 1st teacher practice also went so well. There are twelve of us in total in this intensive training program and we were split into groups of 4. In my group are me, of course, Louis from Quebec, Canada, Aoife
from Galway and Maura from Meade, Ireland. This is a picture of Louis and Maura as Aoife is a bit shy of photos. We each had to teach a 30 minute lesson. Mine and Aoife's included vocabulary words relating to medicine and disease. And before you ask, no, we did not choose that topic it was chosen for us by the school and although it was hard I think we both made the best of it.Louis and Maura had the topic of money with words like "loan sharks" to explain to our students. Our students are long and short-term foreign residents of Galway who are invited to attend these classes free of charge. The longer I am at the Galway Language School the more I can see why it truly is the best place to learn to teach ESL. There isn't any other school like it and I know they are very proud of the fact that their ESL trainees teach at least once a week to actual foreign language students. I can see where this makes all the difference.
We had 7 students come to our class today. Mickael, from France; Jacob from Poland; Gabriel and Evan from Mexico; Nuria and her husband Diego from Argentina and Aramta from Spain. They were all great listeners and participants in our exercises. For the first half hour of our three hour class we, Louis, Maura, Aoife and I, did warm up exercises and got to know our students then Aoife spent a half hour teaching the medical vocabulary. I followed Aoife with exercises designed to compliment the medical vocabulary and reinforce meaning and pronunciation. Louis and Maura presented their vocabulary and exercises next. I don't want to pat us on the back too much but considering how terribly afraid we were of this lesson we all did great.
After our students left the teacher assigned to evaluate our lessons, Paulene gave us her feed back and specific points that we individually need to improve upon before our next teacher practice. She didn't seem so pleased during our presentations but she had so many good things to say. And she pointed out that it is very, very difficult to get the highest grade which is referred to as "passed with distinction" and not to be disappointed if we don't get it. She said they rarely hand it out. Well hurrah for all four of us because we all passed with distinction. I'm sure you can imagine how happy we all are. I have to improve on making more time for the students to talk versus my talking; simplifying my instructions and being more assertive when trying to get the students to conclude their assigned pair work and come back to the global group. Not so bad and I’m sure I can manage to improve for next time. I did think it was funny that the evaluating teacher, Aoife, Louis and Maura all said that I was great at praising the students and that my enthusiasm was terrific but that they were probably not used to it because the Irish are not that outwardly enthusiastic. I suppose being the drama queen that I am I probably went a little overboard with my hand gestures, facial expressions and enthusiastic vocal intonations each time I complimented one of the students for a fabulous, fantastic or wonderful answer. But in defense it was easy to do because they really were great!
Now that this first test is over I am trying not to get too ahead of myself because it really is near impossible to graduate from this course with distinction but it would be nice if one from our group did.
After class I met Jean Marie at the Budding Cafe again and sat and had Chai tea with Ellen and Frank. We were going to go to the gym again tonight but I have a bit of a soar throat and just didn't want to push it. Jean Marie took me to this place famous for fish and chips, McDonagh's on Quay Street and it was delicious. Apparently it's the favorite place of our family friend Sue Cronin so she and Jean Marie both have great taste in fried fish.
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