my wu-chi blog

Thursday, 6 December

At breakfast, Carsten was telling me about Germany, their vacation laws, health care laws and other stuff. Apparently, Germans that are employed are required to get at least 6 weeks of vacation a year. Their health care system used to be a national system and is slowly changing to mirror the US’s bad health care system.

Today had lessons on error correction and phonology. We were then given our teaching assignments for the rest of the program. We each have 6 more classes to teach – I am teaching MTF and MWTh of the following week. My first two classes are with the large beginner class and the high beginners at the hair salon. The rest of my classes are with the intermediate students. We got out around 2 and I stuck around to do two observations – 1) for the follow-up to the class I taught the day before by Cheryl and Beth and 2) was the intermediate class so I could get an idea of what their level was like since they are the majority of my classes. Only two students showed up for the beginner class – I think some if it was due to the rain. Beth and Cheryl did well and did a good job explaining the proper way to not use ‘a scissor’.

Continue reading Last Day of Classes

Wednesday, 5 December

Today is the day – the first lesson with real students. Surprisingly, I was not that worried about it this morning. I woke up a little early and read a little bit before getting up and getting ready. Said my goodbyes to Bill this morning. He caught the bus to Monteverde right after breakfast. Meilady and Sharon left this morning to go to San Jose to see a specialist about sharon’s asthma. I left for school early today (like the rest of this week) so I could try to get help with our fluency activity. It just did not seem like the dialogue activity was correct for fluency and I was right. Fluency is supposed to allow the student to creatively develop the dialogue themselves using the grammar/vocab that we have taught them. Matt gave me a good idea of showing a picture of a classroom and having them pick out object and talk to the other students about it.
Continue reading First Teaching Lesson

Monday, 3 December

Had breakfast early so I could go to school and get caught up on email and look into WWOOFing. Apparently each country has its own website so it is going to take some time to look into this. Today we learned about classroom management, teaching young learners, evaluating textbooks, how to differentiate different student levels (beginning, intermediate and advanced), and then went over the grammar homework and learned about phrasal verbs. Another long day due to a lot of lecturing. At the end of class, we were given our team teaching assignment for the week. I am paired up with Angela and we will be teaching a group of beginner’s on Wednesday afternoon a ‘review’ lesson on possessive nouns and this/these. We learn about making lesson plans tomorrow just before we have time to start working on the lesson so this is not going to be a pretty sight. To make the week more fun, there is a grammar test on Friday and I have to start my 1 on 1 solo teaching sometime this week. Yeah!
Continue reading It's going to be a long week

Friday, 30 November

The lessons today were very broad and not sure if they were very helpful. Actually, that is not correct for the first one was pretty decent – grammar! We went over the sentence elements (subject, verb, object, adverbial and complement). We then went over the parts of the sentence (noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, conjunction, article, interrogative). And we were then given homework – so much for never having homework over the weekend. Ok, now the rest of the class was very broad subjects – 1 to 1 teaching, beginning lesson planning and theme based teaching. Ok, maybe I am just tired from the long week, for looking back on it the only bad one was the 1 on 1 teaching. We went over the pros and cons of doing it and then were told to go pick a name off a list, call them and have 2 lessons with them. WTF!?!?!?! And do what? We were given sample lesson plans but we have no idea who these people are and what the want to learn and by the time we do figure it out, it is too freaking late for we are only have 2 50 minute sessions. Needless to say this part of the class was very frustrating. Right now I am signed up for sessions with Katie’s homestay mom – Katie loves her so we will see how it goes.
Continue reading TGIF!

Wednesday, 28 November

Well, I did not have the wacky dreams last night and it seems like I am a little more awake today. Hopefully this is a good sign. Last night I went through the books that were in my room and started reading one called ‘a long way gone’ which is an autobiography by a guy that was a boy soldier in the Sierra Leone wars in the 90′s. So far so good, given the subject matter. I woke up at 2am with the lights still on for I fell asleep reading the book.

Breakfast was the same as yesterday: granola, yogurt, and fruit. Meilady tried to give me what looks like coffee. I asked for water and she gave me this offended look. I got mint tea instead. Apparently you cannot drink water for breakfast. I made a sandwich for lunch with Blythe today – peanut butter, cucumber and lettuce. I also have an apple and a granola bar. On the way to school I stepped in someone’s crap and could smell it when I went indoors. I tried to clean it off but did not have enough time so I ended up leaving my shoes outside and went around in socks all day. It was actually pretty nice.
Continue reading A Long Day