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Why is work so deceptive? Sometimes it seems like …

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!)

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response to this entry.

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