A story in status updates
After four hard weeks I have finished my CELTA course: I am now qualified to teach people English, which is a rapid development from my situation four weeks ago. I can even tell you what auxiliary modal verbs are without looking them up on Wikipedia. Here's the story of how it happened, as told in Facebook status updates:
Day 1: Luke has that first day at school feeling.Day 1: Luke learnt new names in the morning, more new names in the afternoon, and is teaching a class tomorrow (not on memory techniques).Day 2: Luke was taught Finnish today but has forgotten pretty much all of it already.Day 3: Luke actually does remember some Finnish.Day 4: Luke woke up thinking of his lesson plan. Geek.Weekend 1: Luke would have been driven mad by a day of frustrating assignments & lesson planning were it not for Deb.Day 6: Luke has had his app idea: a phoneme chart with audio when you press the symbols. It wouldn't be in the 'entertainment' category.Day 8: Luke can begin preparing to teach a lesson on defining relative clauses now that he knows what they are.Day 9: Luke might be about to teach an awful lesson.Weekend 2: Luke is done with homework for the day.Day 12: Luke finished another night's planning just in time for sleep.Day 13: Luke got some good work done before dinner, had dinner, anticipated doing more work, didn't.Day 15, morning after UK election night: Luke is teaching a listening lesson about sleepwalking this afternoon, which is pretty appropriate in the circumstances.Day 16: Luke has a load of work to do tonight, hopefully for the last time on this course.Day 17: Luke will find out very soon if his hour-long lesson has an hour's worth of material.Day 17: Luke discovered about half-way through the lesson that he actually had twice as much material as he needed.Day 19: Luke needed calming after (possibly rubbish) lesson planning. Enter Johnny Cash singing songs from his mother's hymnbook.Day 20: Luke has finished his course. Tired and satisfied.
With thanks to the staff, students, and trainees at the Randolph School of English.