CELTA Bootcamp: Day 4

Today, the criticism my peers received after they taught their lessons was unforgiving. Tuesday (the first lesson ever) was pretty nice and soft, but today things got more realistic. It makes me nervous for tomorrow. I realized that it's not that CELTA is challenging only because it's so much work (it's a decently manageable workload), but more because teaching lessons and having them belly dive onto the floor is discouraging--and because we are oftentimes our toughest critic.

It was particularly painful today... For this fellow, George, at least. He did the total opposite, almost, of what he did on Tuesday (which had been to overwhelm students with high-falutin language and motorboat speed words). Today he gave them a reading lesson and was super hands-off. I nearly fell asleep...

Anyway, during the feedback session I was honest and asked him why he had hand-written the reading segment that had been photocopied on the first handout with the picture that he used to get their imagination going... "Well it was blurry"... So he hand wrote it so it would all be legible (rather than RE-PHOTOCOPY it to be NOT blurry!?!??!?!). He also hand wrote a list of reading comprehension questions. The handwriting itself is not the problem. He is actually a very neat writer. However, he decided to capitalize certain words in these questions that should not be capitalized--such as "blah blah blah Jane's Parents blah blah blah," "blah blah blah Jane is Famous," etcetra.

During feedback I mentioned this capitalization (basically that you can't do that...), to which he replied that he wanted to emphasize them since they had been new vocab words. I suggested that he find another way to emphasize them (bold, italics, capitalize the entire word and TELL the students that's what he's doing...). The instructor chimed in at the end with his piece and said that George was darn lucky that the first week is ungraded because a) the lesson plan he turned in was so vague and ineffective it would have failed and b) I was right about the capitalization thing and that in the lesson plan he wrote "english" and that you just can't do that if you're an English teacher. So we'll see what happens to him over the next week or so. A woman in my group asked me later if I thought George would have to drop out... Who knows. I have an odd mixture of pity and irritation whenever I'm around him (which happens frequently since we're together all day, every day).

You are only allowed so many slip-ups in CELTA. There's a booklet where you document everything from how many expert lessons you observe to the grades on your own lessons to how often you have to pee--just kidding about that last part. But seriously, the form for tardies (which have to be signed and verified by Big Whigs) has only three lines on it...

Other curious things George does: refer to "my country" (a.k.a. South Carolina); blow off feedback; complain about how he could use a couple days of adjustment to all of this... *sigh* What does he think this is?! A cakewalk?!

Sidebar:
Listening to my British trainer ALL DAY is starting to wear off on me. Yesterday I came home from CELTA and the internal monologue in my head was spoken with a British accent. Though charming at first, it became horrible and unrelenting after awhile.