Debbie Sealey » 2007 » January

Friday night was great. We thrashed the Fat Camel for a couple of hours while the prices were happy and many communications were forthcoming indeed. Once ‘happy hour’ was over and the prices went back up, in true student form we found alternative and cheaper entertainment in the way of a bottle store and a good yakking session on the balcony of the Apartment. Most subjects were covered, the problems of the world got solved and before we knew it, dawn was imminent, those horrible little bird-things were cheeping in a disgustingly cheerful fashion and that nasty thing called reality began to foist it’s unwanted presence upon us and we all gave up and went to bed.

Needless to say, Saturday was a little on the sluggish side, intelligence-wise. However, it was so good to have relaxed and used one’s cerebral and verbal instruments for something other than brain cell thrashing that it was voted all round as a totally worthwhile venture.

So, to class this morning. Our tutor, in a completely unsympathetic way, gave us no time to reflect on the weekend’s happenings or the state of our heads for that matter, and swept us unmercifully into Expanded Lesson Planning. So, with Lesson Plans, Terminal Objectives (still sounds ominous to me), warmers, dialogues, variables and other sundry terminology swimming about in our heads, we had to at least give the impression that we are intelligent and creative and do a stack of paperwork to back it up.

And, oh goody, a bunch of new steps to memorise.

And so tonight I draw 18 pictures, write a listening activity, filler activities, cheat sheet, handouts, etc,etc, and have the whole things memorized and ready to teach in the morning.

Heck – who needs sleep anyway?

This was a good fun one we did in our class. Everyone writes 3 statements about their family on 3 separate bits of paper (1 sentence each). These things don’t need to be true and can be as ridiculous as you like, i.e. ‘my Grandmother eats aliens’.

Then the bits of paper are screwed up into little balls and put into a container. The students pick out 3 bits of paper from the container, making sure they’re not ones they wrote themselves. Then they walk around the room asking other students questions (‘does your Grandmother eat aliens?’) until they find the owners of the statements and write their names on the corresponding bits of paper. When everyone has found all the owners, the class gets together and shares their knowledge of the others, i.e. ‘Bob’s Grandmother eats aliens, Gladys’ father has trees growing out of his ears and Fred’s sister is invisible’.

Other subjects used could be hobbies, favorite food, if you were invisible for a day, etc.

It’s a good laugh and can be adapted to different skill levels.

Somehow the morning managed to sneak in early. I swear I’d only slept a couple of hours when the alarm went off.

I went to class with a bunch of pictures, some handouts, a pre-recorded tape and no memory whatsoever of the dialogue I was supposed to be an expert in. Somewhere between going to sleep and waking up, it all fell out of my head. I cheated a little and put my dialogue on some sticky notepaper and stuck it on the side of the whiteboard (a tactic I brazenly copied from one of my fellow students). Again, I got great response from my character acting and pictures, but I missed bits out and got my steps so mixed up that I only got a ‘satisfactory’ from the tutor. CAN DO BETTER. Sigh. Fortunately I’ve never aspired to acting. But all the students have been really supportive of each other, so that kind of makes it easier to laugh at yourself and not stress out too much.

On the bright side, I’m apparently amusing, draw great stick figures and speak clearly and with a good pace. At least I have a few saving graces in there somewhere.

I had to go to the bus station at lunchtime to cancel my ticket back home. That started off well, but it was when I turned right instead of left that things started going downhill. Ever tried eating tuna and crackers with a plastic slither while wrestling with crowds on footpaths up radical hills and crossing highways without becoming road kill? I can recommend it as a very stimulating activity if you’re not too attached to surviving it.

This afternoon we looked into Communication Activities. Admittedly it was nice, light relief after the week we’ve had. At some stage soon I’ll share with you some activity ideas. But for now, it’s Friday!!! And you know what THAT means to a student, don’t you? So we’re off to the ‘Fat Camel’ for happy hour, which no doubt will turn into several happy hours and an unhappy head in the morning. But some things just have to be done, and far be it from me to shirk my duty. The last thing I want is for my fellow students to think I’m an unsociable type or the sort that shuns an opportunity for intelligent conversation over a sud or two. Or perhaps this can be looked at as furthering our skills in Communication Activities - aahh, such dedication.

Go away now – I have things to do!

I have come to the realization that I won’t be able to go home for the weekend, as was planned. By the time I get there (4 hours on a bus) and do my homework, it’ll be time to come back again. So rather than play yo-yo’s, I’ll just stay here in Auckland. At least I’ll get to swan on my balcony for more than 10 minutes at a time. I’m looking forward to that!

We mangled some more Greek this morning. First we had to come up with 9 phrases – three that we felt would be 100% necessary if traveling in Greece, three that would be 50% necessary and three that would be 20%. Then we had to create a couple of different role-plays with a partner each. In the first one, I got to play a waiter. It’s funny how a snooty waiter attitude can translate itself across different cultures. Everyone recognizes someone with a towel over their arm and a sneer on their face.

In the other role-play, we were two travelers trying to find our way to the Parthenon Backpackers. I imagine with our accents, we’d be told where to go and how to get there all right…

It was a wee bit different today. Yesterday the tutor started off with dialogue of her own and we had to guess what was being said. She didn’t use much in the way of gestures at first and that made it really tricky. We picked up on the greetings and the work Acropolis, but after that we were completely lost. It sounds so different from English! And they use rather an alarming ‘hoick’ sound when uses ‘h’s. How a person’s supposed to do that without spitting I don’t know. Today we pretty much just picked the tutor’s brains for the words we wanted and wrote our dialogue for the role-plays, which we than presented.

The whole Greek language thing was a really good exercise. I could feel myself going through different stages. Firstly, curiosity, then confusion, then being flustered, then out and out annoyed because my brain wasn’t able to keep up with the pace of the lesson. My gray matter just wanted to grapple with the words I’d got stuck on, and that’s what my concentration got locked into. The rest was just an annoying bunch of sounds that began to feel like an assault. My puny little brain was quickly reaching overload and I can now understand how people could actually almost come to blows in such a situation.

We have to keep a ‘foreign language journal’ and I can see how that’s going to be a vital piece of equipment. We’re to write about our experiences and feelings in learning an unknown language (and I shall not be putting the swearwords I was using in there, because the tutor gets to read it). We have all vowed to look back on our journals regularly in the future to remember what it’s like for our students to have someone coming at them with a whole new bunch of sounds and expecting them to have them memorized after a one hour session!

This afternoon we had to prepare our lessons, etc for our first solo flight into teaching. I’m going to do one on Getting Personal Info-Street Interviews. My characters so far include Oprah Windy the Weathergirl, Speedy Bob the Pizza Delivery man and Rotten Ron the Interior Decorator that is also a chess expert. Again, we had to write the dreaded Lesson Plans at ninety miles an hour and tonight I’ll be drawing another 27 pictures, memorizing my dialogue, creating handouts, etc. Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll get to eat too. The supermarket ‘frozen meals’ section and the microwave are getting a sound thrashing so far. Maybe I’ll be able to glow in the dark by the time the course is finished. Now there’s a trick that’d come in handy if the power goes out.

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.

Today we learned about Basic Lesson planning. Our tutor demonstrated it first, making it look so deceptively simple. ‘No sweat’, I thought - until it came to recalling step-by-step how she had actually done it. It seems these tutors make a career out of minuscule details and how to catch their students out at forgetting them. There’s so much to remember that I couldn’ even recall half of the steps. Suddenly I felt so blonde! You’d think a simple 4-line dialogue combined with actions, etc, would be a doddle. Not so. It started out badly and got worse from thereon out.

Then came – and I think this is going to be a phrase to be dreaded throughout the course – Lesson Plans. Terminal Objectives (somehow that sounds so ominous to me), Enabling Objectives, Accuracy Targets, Timing, Potential Problems, What the Tutor Does, What the Students Do, Handoffs, Horseshoes, Variable and many other bits of teachy-type jargon. All this inside weeny frames on multitudes of pages. I think this is the fastest and smallest I’ve ever written in my life! I guess it’s to prepare us for the never ending thirst for paperwork that some never-seen bureaucrats in hallowed offices somewhere insist on having satisfied. Oh dear.

At lunchtime I managed to get outside to reengage with the real world. I was sitting on a bench watching pigeons in a stunned and mindless sort of way, when a great big guy from the Pacific Islands somewhere sat down to chat. We had a lovely conversation until he asked me if I had any money to give him. That’s when I clicked he was one of the ‘homeless’ of the city. He was a little disappointed when I told him I was a poor student and to let me know if he finds a money source he’s willing to share, but he took it with reasonably good grace.

Back into class to stagger under yet another onslaught of new information. Perhaps this is some kind of torture test to see you have what it takes. Just as you start getting your head around what the Tutor is talking about, they switch topics and start on something else altogether! Agghh!!! Please God, tell me I’m going to get better at this…

We have to co-plan a basic lesson with another student, ready to teach to our fellow students tomorrow morning. This could be a bit of a comedy. I haven’t even got the steps all around the right way and they’re going to let me loose on real human beings already. Oh well, at least we get to share the workload. All I have to do is draw 27 pictures tonight and do some reading and practice the lesson and know it by heart and…..

And the killer hill waits….

I turned up at the course, having found my way without having to stop and ask anyone which way was left, etc. So far so good. I’m the sort that can be following a map in Australia and end up in Africa, so was pretty pleased with myself. I have to walk up a killer hill for part of the way, but the rest is downhill, so that’s cool. Of course I realise that at the end of the day the nice downhill bit will turn into an uphill enemy, but I’ll face that bit when I come to it.

The course is being held on Queen St, right smack in the CBD of Auckland. This is great - as a photographer, there is so much for my eyes to snack on in this area. In my spare time I’ll go for walks with my camera and take a photo of that clock over there, the weird spiral thing on that building, feet walking from street level, pigeons I have met…

Upon getting to the reception area, we are told to wait in the lounge part of the place. I got chatting to a guy with glasses who is also a kiwi. Seems like a nice guy - has a degree in English if you please. He shouldn’t have a problem teaching it then, or at least the spelling and punctuation part.

When we finally got into class after various formalities and paperwork, we found that there are 8 of us students and we have a Greek teacher. Go figure. Learning English from a Greek person - this should be interesting. It turns out that she speaks English very well indeed. And she’s young, but stern. Uh oh.

Four of us students are kiwis, two are from South Korea, one is Welsh and the other comes from Alaska. An interesting bunch of accents indeed.

So I figured today would be a fairly relaxing day, as the first one of the course. WRONG!!!! Oh, what optimism. What naivety. What a fool am I. Next time I read in the fine print that something is an intensive course I’M GOING TO BELIEVE IT. I am now back home laden with homework and still breathing hard and drowning in sweat from that horrible bluddy hill that was lying patiently in wait for me all day, just to raise up top end of itself and stretching to become twice as long as soon as I set foot on it.

I just want to flop on my couch and die, but I can’t - I have work to do. Whenever I do courses, I always forget how exhausting new mental input can be, then madly sign up for another one. WHEN WILL I FINALLY LEARN??!!

It was an interesting day in class though. Firstly, we did a name-game as an icebreaker. You know, where you say your name and where you’re from, then the next person has to say your name then their name and where they’re from, next person says the first two names, then their own, etc. The poor sod at the end of the line has a lot of names to remember, but it is remarkable how effective this game is. Personally, I have a memory like a sieve, but even I was able to remember all the other people’s names.

We also covered warmer modeling (spending a few minutes getting your students comfortable), context modeling (setting the scenario), classroom environments, pictures and props, and the graceful art of stick-figure drawing. Well, not particularly graceful on my part, but apparently the message still gets through, and that’s the main thing.

Okay, better go shower and eat and work. Gasp. I hope my brain still works…

Just a little more about myself here. I am from New Zealand, I’m 43, have 3 offspring (23, 20 and 15) and have decided I’d better finally settle down to one particular career after many years of dabbling in a million different things, i.e. scrubbing toilets (not recommended), beekeeping (interesting but painful), tip-truck-driving (a little scary at times), reflexology (12 years later I’m still loving it), managing a business for a travelling photographer/author (not for yer average mono-tasker), four varied jobs all at once in a Polytechnic (sociable but exhausting), newspaper photography (the money just doesn’t add up for time put in) and nowadays, teacher-aide/student support at an Alternative Education Centre (naughty teenagers - being completely mad is a prerequisite for the job) and literacy tutor, which I enjoy.

So having sat down and thought about things, such as what do I enjoy doing (reading, writing and more reading) and what will support my latest habit of travelling to different countries, I came up with The Answer. TESOL. After a flurry of organising the financing, accommodation, and various other logistics that need covering when planning to leave home for a month, I finally got on the bus to attend the TESOL course at Aspire NZ in Auckland, New Zealand.

Stay tuned to this channel for reports on my latest foray into Learning How To Do Something Properly…

The Pre-Course Experience

During the bus ride up to Auckland, we pulled up along the way at Thames for a rest stop and I sat on a bench to get some fresh air. Turned out I was sitting next to a woman is a TESOL teacher and has been teaching in Japan for the last ten years. How’s THAT for random?!

I got to the city having yakked most the way on the bus with the girl I sat next to, who is in Marketing and Advertising. We looked at photos of India on my laptop, and before we knew it we were in Auckland.

Chris from Aspire school picked me up – well actually, he gave me a lift in his van. He showed me the neighborhood and gave me the key to my eighth floor Apartment. That deserves a bold word because it’s so cool. I now have an important looking electronic thingy that I have to wave at the entrance and the elevator to enter the place. This is SO 007!

I settled in and perched on the balcony to have a look around. The guy in the apartment next door came out to his balcony and we chatted for a little while. He’s from Berlin, Germany, and drives a truck for days at a time as a job. I asked if he liked New Zealand and he said he did, but it’s too small. I suppose it would feel like that when you drive through various countries for a living.

I tested out my sense of direction and went for a wander down the road to the supermarket. I had a lovely chat to the checkout girl who is from Gujarat in India and made it back to the Apartment safely. So far, so good.

After a $2.50 frozen dinner in my Luxury Apartment (when will I ever get to say this again?), I decided to open the wine that I’d bought and swan about on the balcony. But I couldn’t get the cork out. After about ten minutes of pulling, writhing around and madly struggling with it, I jumped in the elevator and went down onto the street to see if I could find a man. A few doors from the apartment block is a miniature shop. I went in there and the lovely man behind the counter – from Jordan I think – struggled with it himself for about ten minutes, between serving customers. He finally resorted to using a screwdriver while I ducked down behind the counter in case things got out of control. I’ve had a mortal fear of wine corks since one hit me in the mouth once from a few inches away. I had to drink that bluddy bottle through a straw. Nd I ad to alk like is or a ew days. Never forgotten it.

Anyway, out the cork finally came and I padded happily back up the street, realizing along the way that I had bare feet and an open bottle of wine. Probably not a good look really, when one is in the neighbourhood of Luxury Apartments. Never mind, I’m back here now, swanning about as swanningly as I can on the balcony looking straight across at the Sky Tower. Well I would be if there weren’t a darned building in the way. I can see the top part of it though and that’s the best bit anyway. Tonight it’s a kind of lilac colour. Rather a fine sight while sipping cheap bubbly wine out of a coffee cup. Stylish, aye what?

It seems eerily calm here though, after being in Bangkok. And so quiet after New Delhi. I haven’t heard a single honk yet. Weird.

So that’s my first day in the Big A. I’ve met several people already and I’ve only been here a few hours. Gosh the city is a friendly place.

Tomorrow I have to find my way down onto Queen Street and start studying.

Sigh. Just one more cup of bubbly then I’ll go to bed. I promise…