The Wanderings of busman7

So last Thursday, as class ends for the day, our trainer says don’t forget the exam tomorrow also the grammar exercises are due & your presentation for next Tuesday will be  8-10 min. interactive lesson geared towards beginning nonnative English speakers on the words; for/since.

WTF—–DUH——IMPOSSIBLE!!!

Shelve that task until the weekend (have to do it then as sitting in on a lesson being taught by one of the students from 6 week class Mon. evening + the week is so busy that can’t let things build up to the last minute or will be swamped).

During the next couple days nagging little thoughts come & go on how to accomplish the impossible until while doing laundry Sun. morning they start to come together in a somewhat cohesive plan. Jotting these ideas down over the course of the morning then letting them to marinate over a walk down the street for a 35 Baht lunch with a stop at Tops for some munchies & a floor mop, helps to get the cobwebs out of the brain so it can do some logical thinking.

To cut to the chase once I started to realize that yes this was a teaching course & he was looking for a presentation in the form of a lesson using my fellow classmates as students & keeping to simple words, it all came together.

Tuesday; The presentation went well, even ran a couple minutes overtime, trainer will be letting us know tomorrow what our grades are on it. The lesson I was supposed to sit in on Monday was cancelled due to the Red Shirt demonstrations in Bangkok closing the street in front of the school for a couple hours, so it has been rescheduled for tomorrow.

Received the date, next Wednesday, for our first practice teaching class. Have to make a lesson plan for a dry run on Friday & the next exam is Thursday so no rest this week.

C grade on my presentation along with the rest of the class except the one guy who hadn’t prepared his, apparently a normal grade for the first interactive one. Have to make better use of the white board in future, another chance next Monday when I have one on; There is/are/have, discussing the problems encountered in teaching the use of them to Thais, another interesting challenge.

Sat in on the lesson given by a 6 week course student where I found he had an easier time with this class of language school students (a group of Burmese nuns in training, same class I will be teaching next Wed.) than we do in presentations to our fellow students who tend to give each other a bit of a hard time (all in fun though).

With Thursday’s exam out of the way & the dry run TP (Teaching Practice) lesson done then another lesson on Thai culture we have survived week 2 no problems. This according to others who have taken the course means we are pretty well assured of graduating providing we keep our noses to the grindstone.

If I thought this past week was busy that’s because it was preparing us for the next 2 weeks which ARE going to be busy we have a class presentation, 1 or 2 evening TP’s & 2 exams in each week, of course new material to study presented daily. OUCH!!!!

So all I have to do this weekend is prepare my presentation for Monday, make some changes in my TP lesson plan & study for the Wed. exam & study, study & study some more for the GRAMMAR exam!!

Friday’s exam is on grammar which will be (for me anyway) a B***h considering this statement taken from one of our course modules “Third, and finally, from the undeniably extra demands made on EFL/ESL teachers by Asian learners comes the magnificent reward – a greater knowledge about their own language than possessed by people in any other profession in the world, bar none – –“

A bit of trivia, the movie The King and I, about an English governess hired by the King of Siam to teach the children of his harem, is banned in Thailand.

Also as due, either coincidence, fate or whatever the day we (hopefully) graduate & receive our TEFL certificates falls on the day of my mothers 90th birthday.

results from Thursday’s exam, another B.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 21:14 and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.