October 21, 2009

  • Lessons since Monday have been much better! Just the big Thursday to get through.... at least afterwards I have three and a half days to recover! No, seriously, yesterday and today were actually good. I'm still not loving the really big classes, especially the ones where the teacher does absolutely nothing, but otherwise they've been ok and my lesson plans seem to going down well, although we keep running out of time to finish the activities, so I'll have to start shorterning the plans somewhat I think!

    I mentioned last time that I'm starting private lessons next week. I'm actually doing two lots on the Tuesday, one after the other. The first group is the four 9 year olds, actually 2 boys and 2 girls. One is the son of one of the English teachers I work with. The second group is going to be three 12 year old girls, daughters of friends of the English teacher. So I've got to think of some ideas for that now as well. It's not going to be quite like what I was doing in Trento because there the first family had so many English materials from their time in America, that I was really just reading their books with them, and was also able to borrow stuff for the other family. This time I am pretty much without materials, except anything I can print off (will have to sneakily do it at school!) to use. I don't have any games and the like though. The teacher is going to show me their English school books tomorrow so at least I will be able to see what they might in theory know...

    I've been looking into the possibility of doing a TEFL course whilst out here. There are lots of intensive weekend ones in England, for about £300, which I considered doing. However the best one is probably CELTA (Cambridge run) but in England it costs £1200, and in Italy €1500... rather a big investment for something which I may not necessarily end up using then. There is a course in Verona though which would be perfect - it's from January to June, part time just on Fridays (which happens to be my day off...). Verona is easy and cheap to get to, and the cousre is from 10.00-18.00. I was seriously tempted, until I saw the price! That said, I also started looking at the PGCE course options last night and that is £3225... but I've always said I don't really want to teach modern languages in the UK, I would much rather teach English...either abroad or in the UK but at private language schools etc. I will have to think some more....
    There's been a lot in the news recently about the MoD having to shed 10,000 desk jobs etc etc, so I'm wondering what the chances of there actually being a job there for me to come back to are... still, they have collected references and done the security and medical checks, so it's progressing, but there are still rather too many months for them to decide not to take me on after all...