CELTA day 5 -- lunch break

Last night was thankfully far less stressful than Wednesday night. All told, I probably did 3 hours of work after we wrapped up at 5 pm: a half-hour with the other people in my teaching group compiling a class profile (for our first assignment), and another two and a half hours doing lesson planning and various bits of administrativa. But it was all stuff I knew how to do, so there was no pressure.

I finished around 9:30, went to Maz for an hour, said hi to Marc, Ian, Jess, and (very briefly) Jimmy, and then went home.

And then it happened: I dreamed dreamt dreamed about tesl. (Sigh. Now I'm making language mistakes. And, for those who didn't ask, "dreamed" and "dreamt" are both apparently correct. But I needed to look it up to make sure.) Dear gods, make it stop!

In any event...

This morning, our courses covered: 1. a recap of teaching grammar and some prep for our second assignment (essentially grammar analysis), and 2. error correction (identifying types of errors and why they are made). I discovered a way nifty book called Learner English, which discusses common types of errors, divided by nationality. So, for example, for a given language it will say what phenomes (sounds) are shared between the language and English and which are different, what grammar constructions or pronunciations tend to get carried over into English, etc. Tres cool, non?

I had Belle Province for lunch today. SO bad for me, but SO tasty!

This afternoon, I'm teaching the second half of a listening lesson. However, our teaching is completely unsupervised. Our trainer won't even be in the room. Which means, I think, that we get to leave early because we're not having a feedback session (usually runs 4:15 - 5 pm). Yay! Early Friday! Catch you on the flip side!

CELTA day 5

This afternoon's session was a lot of fun, actually. The teachers went a bit off our lesson plans (we all seemed to miscalculate the timing), but the students were very relaxed and talkative. I'm not sure whether I want to attribute this to the lack of supervision (as I said, our trainer was not in the room while we were teaching), but it is true regardless. Everyone left happy, both students and teachers, so all is well. Most of the other teacher-trainees headed over to the Peel Pub after wrapping up, but I decided to head home instead. (Mostly because of Ian's party tomorrow, I'll be losing a half-day and wanted to get some work done tonight.)

( Behind the cut, the things I need to do for the weekend, in probably too much detail for all but my diehard readers -- you know who you are. )

Of course, I've just wasted 20 minutes of time updating my LJ about doing work instead of actually doing the work. I suppose I should better get to it.