TEFL course diaries - Kate Sutcliffe

I really don’t seem to be able to get the hang of pitching my target language at the right level - today, teaching the upper group, I made my lesson too easy. So I’m spending this evening trying to think of fiendishly difficult vocabulary items to introduce to them on Wednesday… imperilled, for example, and tuberculosis. Just hope I don’t over-compensate and pitch it too high! I’m also having difficulty maintaining an authoritative, teacherly air. I think it doesn’t help that most of the students are older than I am…

It seems like we’ve been taught most of the things that we’re actually going to be taught, now. We still have a few more classes - some more grammar, and a lesson on comparing the different available coursebooks - but mostly now it’s practice teaching and working on individual student profiles. A highly effective, if slightly uncomfortable, way to learn. I’m used to finding things out from books and then discussing them with my supervisors, not jumping in at the deep end and actually trying to put my new knowledge to some practical use!

I haven’t done very much work today. Instead of rushing straight home after church, Jon and I went to make a rope swing in the woods. Definitely a good decision! Everyone needs a chance to run about and get covered in mud sometimes, even in the middle of an intensive course

In the afternoon I started thinking about Wednesday’s lesson. The subject I’ve been given is, invitingly, ‘Simple Past and Past Perfect in a story’. I like stories. The one I chose in the end was that of the Victorian lifeboat heroine Grace Darling. Jolly good fun, and plenty of scope for sentences like ‘When it got light, Grace saw the survivors from her window. The ship had sunk in the night, and most of the passengers had drowned, but some people had managed to cling on to the rocks.’ Simple past and past perfect… lovely.

Still a bit worried about tomorrow’s lesson - teaching the higher group for the first time - but I decided that a day and half was quite enough time to allocate to one hour’s teaching. And I’m pretty sure that sometime at the start of the course, someone told us that our lessons could never be perfect. Just as well, really…

I’m quite concerned that my being a teacher is going to have a detrimental effect on the environment. Today so far I’ve used 17 sheets of A4 paper and four of card - and I still haven’t finished planning that lesson on the 3rd conditional. What with worksheets, games, flashcards, and fully-scipted lesson plans, I’m beginning to think all TEFL teachers should be required to plant at least three trees a week…

We’ve discovered that our kitchen is a good place for a trampoline. That might sound unlikely, but it’s quite a large kitchen - and rather a small trampoline. It allows one to keep company with whoever’s cooking dinner whilst simultaneously indulging the desire to bounce up and down.

I think I might go and pay a visit to the kitchen now. Perhaps a little exercise will help me think of another 10 minutes’ worth of practice on hypothetical sentences. I really hope so…

I’ve just joined the Cloud Appreciation Society. It’s amazing what things you can find to do on the internet when you’re supposed to be planning a good way of presenting the interrogative form of the third conditional. What would have happened if you’d messed around on the internet all weekend and not planned the lesson? Answer: I’d have failed the course…

Actually I like the third conditional. I like the first and second too, but the third is entirely hypothetical. It’s how we talk about things that are impossible, because the chance for them to happen was in the past, and they didn’t happen. (Let’s just hope it is appropriate for me to use the third conditional to talk about not planning my lesson by Monday…)

Today we did some grammar and talked about teaching Business English. We were reminded that actually business people do need to speak the same language as everybody else! It’s just that they have particular, extra, special requirements on which it’s necessary to focus. We were also told various stories of extremely bad and extremely good contracts with Italian companies, and warned to be very careful what we sign, wherever we go.

Why is work so deceptive? Sometimes it seems like there’s hardly anything to do, but it takes forever… other times you think you’re going to be working all night, but somehow it all just evaporates! Perhaps the latter is partly because I’m just concentrating on getting the work done, and not on how good my marks are. There’s so much to do, there isn’t usually time for reading things through, debating the finer points of vocabulary and sentence construction.

Today we had only one lesson! (Well, two lessons in one session, but they were both Russian, so it felt like one really) - which was nice. That’s it now - no more Russian. At least, not with ULT - the lessons were really interesting though, and I’m thinking I might like to learn a bit more Russian. When I’ve finished the course, that is. They were also very interesting from a teaching beginners point of view. Today we started to learn the alphabet, which was very pleasing. We didn’t do all the letters, but we did enough to spell the words we’d learnt so far, and our names. One of the striking things was how well all of our Russian lessons fitted together, everything building on what had been learnt already. Makes you realise how you must have to plan a whole series of lessons in one go when teaching beginners, to make sure they’re going to learn at the start what you’ll need them to know in two or three lessons’ time.

All afternoon I’ve been writing up my Foreign Language Journal - basically recounting the Russian lessons, techniques the teacher used, how the group responded, and things like that. Also thinking of differences between English and Russian, and what the experience taught us about teaching beginner students (a lot!)

Hm. I definitely have less work to do this evening, but it seems to be taking me just as long to do it! Transcription takes a very long time. So does finding all the bits you need to hand in and putting them in the right folder… we were advised at the start of the course to always file things in the right place the moment we’d finished with them. This was a bit too organised for me - but now I’m wishing I’d listened!

So. Second ever lesson went better than the first - some of the students actually seemed to learn some of the language I was trying to teach them. Hooray! Next week I’ll be teaching the upper group rather than the lower group. I’ve just got used to making all my language super-simple so that the lower group understand it, and I think it’s going to be quite difficult not making next week’s lessons too easy - apparently the upper group are very good at English. I still don’t know how anyone can manage to pitch the language at the right level without having taught the group at least a couple of times first.

This afternoon we had more grammar - passives. Because I’ve studied a lot of grammar before, I’m finding it quite easy to follow the grammatical part of the course. But I think people who haven’t done much before are finding it quite difficult, because we do just have to go through it without there being much time for explanation.

We’ve got more Russian in the morning and… a free afternoon! Well, free to do our transcriptions and foreign language journals and things. Looking at the timetable, it does seem to be a little more relaxed from now on - more lessons to plan and assignments to hand in, but fewer input sessions at college. And it’s amazing how quickly the first week and a half (40%!) has gone.

It seems to have taken me a very long time indeed to prepare my second lesson. I’ve been working on it almost all evening, as well as yesterday evening, and some time this morning. I now have colour-coded flashcards, and lots of sheets to photocopy in the morning before it all begins. There’s so much work to do at the moment, with various assignments as well as the lesson plans, that time seems to be going past in a crazy whirl of working, working, eating (keep needing lots of energy for all that work!), working, trains being cancelled (grrr), waiting, working… I’m feeling mostly better now (hooray!) - but alas, other people on my course seem to be getting ill. I hope it’s not entirely my fault…

Today we were given lots of ideas for getting students to practise language, as well as having sessions on communicative games and teaching young learners. We were advised not to teach children younger than three, but apparently it’s normal to start teaching English to children at about that age in lots of countries. I think it would be fun (lots of toys and bright colours!) but also very tiring. And I imagine it would require more preparation than an adult lesson, or at least more thought, because each session would need to be packed with interesting activities. No gap-filling exercises for three year olds!

We were warned against gap-filling exercises, even for adults. Obviously too many people have got them wrong over the years (too easy, too hard, gaps too small…) - and I know it’s boring to go to lessons where you have to fill in gaps all the time. We were encouraged to try more active things, like running dictations, and language relays. Just hope we don’t all try the out on the same day, or the poor students will hardly get chance to sit down!

As far as learning from my mistakes goes, I think that my first ever lesson will probably be a big success… I hope so anyway! There were some good things - apparently I was speaking clearly enough, and some of the activities were good. But the main problem was the language I used on the worksheet that was to help with presenting to the students the vocabulary I was trying to teach. The vocabulary itself was ok, but the language I used around it on the sheet was a bit too complicated for most of the people in the lesson. So they began by not really being able to understand the words, which wasn’t really a very good start! The students are quite mixed in ability, but some of them don’t have very much English at all, and it really is necessary to be very basic (using the past perfect and adjectives like ‘dented’ was a bit too much).

I was very impressed by my colleagues’ lessons this morning. They all seemed so natural and friendly in front of the class, and seemed to have complete control of what was going on in the lesson (though they assured me afterwards that actually they too were feeling somewhat nervous!)

Anyway, there’s been so much else to do today that the lesson already feels like a long time ago. I’ve been working on an individual profile, interviewing a student. It’s harder than you’d think to type up a transcription of a recorded conversation. And yes, we’ve already started planning lesson two, which will be on Wednesday. Very simple language for the lower intermediates this time!

It’s Sunday, and I still feel like I’ve been working most of the day… I guess that’s not true, as I had time to go to church this morning, and to have a rest this afternoon. Mostly been working on the profile today - my individual assessment of a student. I’ve got an interview with said student tomorrow afternoon - after teaching my first ever lesson in the morning - quite a busy day! It begins early, with an 8.50am deadline for our phonetics assignment. I do wonder if all these early deadlines are really just there to make sure we turn up promptly on the days when we’re teaching.

I’m not as nervous as I expected to be. Nobody armed with so many different bits of coloured card could possibly be nervous! (Actually, the highly detailed lesson plan is probably helping a bit too). I’ve also roped in various family members and my boyfriend to be different voices on the listening cassettes I needed to record. Hope they didn’t mind too much, as I guess it’s a request I’m likely to be repeating.

After almost an entire day of trying to think of practice exercises, worrying about the right amount of vocabulary to teach to lower intermediate students, and shouting at my computer for not doing what I wanted with tables - I have finally managed to produce a complete lesson plan! Hooray! It’s 58 minutes long (instead of the prescribed 60), but the lesson itself will only be 45 minutes, so I’m hoping that will be acceptable. I’m also hoping that I’ll be completely better by Monday morning because otherwise, no matter how good the flashcards and memory game I have still to produce, I won’t be able to deliver the lesson for the spasms of coughing which seem to be afflicting me every five minutes…

Today has been something of a struggle, beginning in the morning (lovely, bright and frosty) as one brother went off ice skating, my mum and uncle went out for a walk - and I had to stay at home thinking about how to teach the topic of Retailing. I have to say, I didn’t expect to be making flashcards of ‘consumer durables’ and ‘own label goods’ at this stage (especially as it’s not business people we’re teaching). But the idea was to give us something the students were not very likely to have come across before. The hardest thing was thinking how to get enough practice of the words in, as they’re not really ones that come up very often in everyday conversation.

I get to leave the house in a minute(!) in order to go and buy more printer paper and coloured card. Then I’ll be cutting, sticking, and trying to draw pictures of guarantees and closed circuit television - which sounds quite fun really. Honest.

And after that? Finished for the day? Not quite… there’s still a profile interview to think about, also for Monday. And of course Wednesday’s lesson to start planning. I know it must get a lot quicker planning lessons, else teachers would have to spend five times longer working at home than they did at school, and I’m pretty sure life doesn’t contain sufficient time for that…