Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Teaching.... not so bad.
So, yesterday was my second mini lesson. It was way better than the first one. This was a vocabulary lesson, and we got to pick the topic. I decided it was time for my Peruvian friends to learn about football.... American style. I only had 20 minutes, so I was limited to about 4-5 words. I assumed they knew NOTHING about football, so we went super simple: helmet, shoulder pads, field, football and the possibility of also needing to teach "to protect" (but it turned out they knew that one already - which was what I was hoping for).
I was the last one in our group to go and since we observe everyone else, I had heard one of the students mention that he liked to play soccer. This was the perfect lead in for me. As we've been taught, I wrote my name and our objective "Football Vocabulary" on the board. Before I even finished writing "vocabulary," the same student was saying, "Wait! Football like soccer, or football like you watch in the United States?" (The student happens to be one of the security guards at the school and knows us all, so I had to give him a hard time.) "I'm talking about real football." Lots of laughing and poking fun ensued.
The lesson went great! All the stuff that I sucked at last time, I pretty much fixed this time, a couple slip ups, but HUGELY improved. Pretty much nothing but praise from the teacher this time. She, of course, still gave me a couple things to work on, but from the teaching technique aspect... I totally rocked it!!! YAY!!!!!!!! (of course, it's easy to be awesome when you're teaching football).
Today we went back to grammar! I'm living on the glory of yesterday's lesson because I'm terrified of Friday's lesson. Yes.... I have to teach grammar!! I haven't picked my subject yet, but I'm leaning towards comparative and superlative adjectives. I also have a grammar paper due on Friday, which might be more terrifying than teaching grammar. On the plus side, tomorrow is the last day we are working on grammar in class. I think after that we move on to using games to teach... MUCH better than grammar. Thursday we meet with the teacher we will be teaching for next week.
Monday starts our practical teaching week and we will be teaching real, paying, clients. We basically just take over one of the classes that is currently being taught at Maximo. So we have the same students, at the same time, everyday for one week. Our teacher will be there (not the person who usually teaches the class, but our TEFL instructor), but strictly for observation. We picked our classes today, and I'll be teaching Basico 2 (this is month 2 of the basic level, so while the ages of the students will be 16 year and up, they are all language babies.) I'm really excited. This is actually the level I wanted and the regular teacher is someone I observed last week. I thought he did a great job and I'm sure he'll be helpful in our meeting on Thursday. He just finished TEFL a couple months ago here, so he knows exactly what they will be looking for in observations.
Also, I ran into the Security Guard Student several times today and I'm slowly explaining important terms like quarterback, running back, receiver, tight end, and because he is confused about how the average person plays football - two-hand touch and flag football. He likes to give me a hard time about liking "United States Football" so while he was giving my a hard time I decided he need to learn another new word, and told him he was a "hott mess". HEHE!!! I crack myself up!!
1 Comments:
Happy to hear your session went better.You keep giving that security guard words of wisdom and pretty soon you will have someone to discuss football with (I know that would be a hardship for you).
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