Day 3 - Do Not Feed Pink Buns to Elephants
Well, we did our Shared Teaching Practice - myself and one of my fellow students from South Korea. It went reasonably smoothly, considering we had zero practice together. As I thought, it turned out to be a bit of a comedy. Our context was Pets, and admittedly we did have a few unconventional ones. I realised that in future I should not feed my elephant pink buns, as some people have not read about this in their primary school books and the concept of pink buns can be remarkably difficult to explain to people who have never eaten them. However, everyone understood that my pet frog got fed to my pet snake and some of the audience were rolling around laughing at the look on the frog’s face (err, that would be me. Needeep…). My pictures were stick-figurish to the extreme but they still worked, much to my inner-artist’s relief. My partner’s preparations were great and she and I shared the teaching rather well, all things considered. A good thing about all the concentration on steps and so forth is that you almost forget to be nervous. It is a little weird though, not being able to speak with your students outside using your planned dialogue. It turns out that the clowning workshop I did a few years ago is finally coming in handy.
On the not-so-good-side, we stuffed our recorded dialogue up, having got confused about who should be saying what, I got all mixed up about what we should ‘elicit’ (that’s teacher-speak for write on the whiteboard) and I hadn’t memorised the dialogue properly and thus deviated slightly from what I should have been saying. Not a problem for our victims/fellow students, but could turn bad in a real situation.
This afternoon we launched into “Self-Access Teaching”, (which means you decide what you want to learn and pick your teacher’s brains), and learned a spot of Greek. It was rather fun, but I think we managed to murder the Greek language in the process. However, if I ever go to Greece, at least I will know how to get on the metro, find a cheap place to stay and the police station and get a meal in while I’m at it. Hopefully the cheap meal and accommodation will not actually be IN the police station.
We only have a bit of reading to do for homework tonight, so I took the time to investigate my neighbourhood a little more. Success! Not only did I find a nice little Thai place in a food hall, but I also found a way to avoid THE HILL. There’s still a hill, but nowhere near as murderous as the nasty beast I would normally have to climb. And there’s lots of shop windows and things that I can pretend to be looking in while I gasp and pant and try to get my breath back. On the way I bought a set of earphones to use with my IPod, so I don’t have to poke those horrible little white ones back into my ears when they fall out, as happens with monotonous regularity.
I’m slowly getting to know my German neighbour more. He let me use his laptop to check my email, but I have found that German keyboards are a little different from English keyboards and I must have written z instead of y about 45 times. Now there’s a funny thing - I didn’t realise how many words in the English language end in y. Amazing what you find out when you least expect it.
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