Monday, October 18, 2010

Class - Day 6 (Week II)

It was another lovely day in Galway with mild temperatures and a wee bit of sunshine from time to time throughout the afternoon just to keep our spirits up.

Well morning classes were spent learning more grammar including the past simple and past continuous forms. I want so much to just wake up and have all this grammar information leaping about my head just waiting to be shared with the world but I am not holding out much hope on that happening. I am trying hard to commit it all to memory so I can, with ease, impart the information to all my students without a moment’s hesitation but my brain is resisting my efforts at every possible turn.

I took some pictures of my classmates including the worldly Vince who has led a very exciting life as an archeologist. He is taking the class now because, like most fields, the archeology jobs are just not plentiful.

We also have Kim who is graduating from college here in Galway with a teaching degree. She is from near New Haven, Connecticut and is very sweet. I took a quick picture of Kim, Ruth and Maura who were eating lunch before we had to head off to our respective classrooms to teach. Maura is in my teacher group and did an absolutely phenomenal job on her teacher practice today. She’s a natural and fingers crossed she goes in for a job interview next week to teach special needs children here in Galway and I am confident she’d be great at that. I’m not sure if she’ll use what she’s learned in this ESL course but I think any knowledge is helpful.

My last picture is of Darren as he was getting ready to leave class to attend his college graduation which was this afternoon. It is so nice to be around such happy, truly enthusiastic young people. We have a great class because everyone genuinely wants to be here and we all are extremely animated and outgoing. You certainly know I’m always happy to speak up and give my thoughts solicited or not.

The afternoon session went exceptionally well as my teacher group (me, Maura, Louis and Aoife) had our second teacher practice. I really, really love the teaching part of all this. The students are fantastic and were the same as last week’s teacher practice session with the addition of Karen, a young college student from Vienna, Austria and without Nuria, Diego and Gabriel who were unable to make it today. Louis topic for his teaching session was food and Karen spoke about her favorite Austrian dish, kaisershmarren which is like a pancake that is literally ripped apart with a fork and then sprinkled with sugar and sometimes includes apples, pears or plums. Yum, yum. She even offered to make us some for our next class session which is Thursday but the kitchen in her dorm is so small and inadequate for that kind of cooking. How adorable are these students that they are offering to cook for us.

We were all given the task of teaching a lesson that was all focused on speaking skills. And with that mission in mind we were then asked to customize our lessons to a topic the school chose for us. My topic was “job interviews” so I did one activity where I had each student work with a partner and discuss a job interview they had been on in the past in particular one that included either a funny, scary or strange incident. The students had a lot of fun with it and Mickael from France who is still in his early twenties had actually worked at a morgue. He’s very sweet and young and I would never have guessed he had a job like that but it just goes to show you that many, many people have really interesting stories and are just waiting for someone to ask the right question to get them to come out.

My second exercise was given to me by one of our tutors and it was a list of questions an employer might ask during an interview. I changed it up a bit and retyped it so that my students then read the list and decided which questions were not appropriate to ask during an interview. That turned out to be lots of fun because the students had a lot to say about what shouldn’t be asked and since the lesson was all about practicing their speaking skill it could not have been more perfect.

There was one final exercise, and mind you all three of these exercise and my introduction all took place in 30 minutes, the designated time limit. For this exercise I printed out pictures of people performing jobs like a policeman, fireman, doctor, etc and I had each pair of students pick one picture and do a role play exercise where one student was interviewing for the type of position pictured and the other student was the employer interviewing them. I was amazed at what they came up with but the funny thing was all the students who interviewed a potential employee had the same problem. They all felt their potential employee wanted too much money. In the end the potential employees were all getting hired even if it was on a trial basis and my lesson was pretty successful because it got the students speaking for pretty much the whole lesson time. Also, all four of us in my group passed this lesson and received, like the last one, distinctions. We are all very proud but cautions not to get too ahead of ourselves. We have a lot more assignments to complete and 5 more teacher practices to go before we complete the course.

I met Jean Marie at the budding café and we headed to the gym where I played around in the water and Jean Marie sat and read because she seems to have come down with the same cold as I have.

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