This entire week has been a teaching extravaganza so
far!!! Wowza! I have taught a 45-minute Czech lesson every
night for the past three nights and I
have another one to teach tomorrow as well!
To recap, my first lesson (on Monday night) went awesome! My topic was books and I was assigned to
teach vocabulary. I taught my Czech students
target language which included: genre, fantasy, drama, suspense, romance,
bestseller, paperback and hardcover. Eliciting
and helping them understand “suspense” was difficult, whoa. That certainly threw me for a loop. You do not realize the slight difference between
words until you are attempting to teach them to people who do not speak the
language, that’s for sure! They were
stumped between the difference of “drama” and “suspense.” I mimed out suspense, I tried explaining
using limited vocabulary, it took a while but they finally seemed to get it.
For one of my activities, I split them into small
groups and handed out homemade book covers to each group. They needed to guess what the book’s genre is,
if it’s long or short, a bestseller, paperback or hardcover.
And for my final activity (there was a bit more
between the introduction and the first activity, and then more between the
first activity and the final activity), I split them into groups again, handed
each of them an actual book (I brought along 5 of my own) and explained: one of
them was a book salesperson, the other was a critic. The salesman had to sell/launch their book to
the other person. The critic had to
decide whether or not they liked the book and would buy it. This was very cute, they loved it.
One of our students, Vladka, is a quiet 17 year old
girl. Long, straight curtains of brown hair,
big dark eyes and a sullen, serious look on her face at all times, she has been
a rather difficult one, especially in the beginning. Whenever she is asked a question, she answers
with a stern “I don’t know” in a strong Czech accent. However during the last two lessons, she has
slowly but surely warmed up and began talking a bit more.
Another student named Karel, an older man, who I would
estimate at around 55 years old, heavier set with large reading glasses, he
barely speaks at all. And when he does,
his face turns tomato red and he shakes.
However my two fellow TEFL students and I have found that during
activities, if we monitor him closely and quietly but directly give him some
extra help, a large smile will slowly and shyly stretch across his face,
similar to that of a bullfrog ha-ha. He
is super cute.
Anyway, in terms of feedback for my first lesson, my
teacher said the following: “excellent first lesson Brooke, very strong, fantastic
job. Great presence up there, great
topic, you need to do a bit more CCQing (concept check questions) and give more
error correction, otherwise though, great job, very strong lesson.”
Now for my second lesson: not so hot. I was assigned a “listening” lesson. I chose to play “Octopus’ Garden” by the
Beatles. Then I handed the class
worksheets with the lyrics printed out but some words were replaced with blanks
which they had to fill. As my final
activity (again, there was more between final activity and fist activity), I
split the class intro groups and had each group come up with a sea
creature. They had to figure out what
that creature eats, who its friends are in the ocean, what it likes to do in
the ocean, etc. Then they had to
describe their animal to the class without saying the actual name of the
animal, leaving the class to guess what animal it was.
The content of my lesson was really good, my teacher
said. However my lesson was too short, I
didn’t have enough CCQ’s and did not give enough feedback/error
correction. Ugh!!
Now to today’s lesson: hands down the biggest bummer
of all. I had to teach grammar, which is
already terrible in itself. I was to
teach future tense, using the present continuous. I bet at least half of you reading this just
thought, wait, what is that!? Exactly. The future tense deals with making
plans. So I decided to have the class
plan a party as their overall main activity.
Again, I was told my presence in front of the class
was great, my activities were good, everything was executed well. However I did not do enough error correct, not
enough CCQ’s and finally…drum roll….I did not teach the future tense with the
present continuous correctly!!!! AHHHHHH!!!!
Such a bummer, especially because I suspected this might have been the
case when I was planning my lesson. My
instructor said it’s all good, we are still in training, that is neither here
nor there so not to worry, but yes, ultimately I didn’t teach the correct
conditional. Damn. Huge fail.
Tomorrow, guess what I have to teach?? I can either: try again with the future tense
using present continuous (awesome), or I can teach second conditional (double
awesome) (I bet at least 25% of you reading this just thought, what is that? Am I right?).
So wish me luck. And we will see
how it goes!!
In other news…I have found a fellow pastry lover,
one of my classmates is just as into having a daily pastry as I am, how cool is
that!? So he and I have taken to making
pastry runs during our break every day between 11am-11:30am. As I mentioned in a previous post, there is a
farmer’s market stall next to our school Tuesday through Friday. Our favorite dessert so far is a large slab
of spice cake covered on top with a thin layer of apricot jam, topped with a
very thin chocolate in the texture of a thin bark. It is DELECTABLE!!! And it costs 28 Czech Koruna, which is the equivalent
of about $1.50.
 |
| Beautiful Prague. |
Tonight after class, I joined five of my classmates for
a beer down the street from our school, which was a lot of fun. We all swapped stories and shared lesson
laughs in the lively, smoky bar. Ah,
another thing I have to get used to here.
Many of the bars and restaurants allow smoking inside. A huge, huge bummer. Not all of them allow it either, it’s
sporadic depending on the place. You
kind of have to just peer in the window as you walk by to see if it’s allowed
or not.
And in terms of final exciting news, my friend from
Germany will be visiting me this weekend, which I am really looking forward to
as we have lots of fun together! He is
sweet, thoughtful and incredibly silly, so I enjoy his company very much.
 |
| More Old Town Square action! |
Stay tuned for a delicious dessert blog entry,
coming soon!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment