The Legend of CELTA - A Blink to the Last (Week 4, Monday-Thursday)

On Monday I was teaching the Pre-Intermediates for the second time. My Sunday evening planning session was a nightmare. The topic was phrasal verbs, which are a nuisance to teach because they don't really follow any rules. The lesson went well, though, for the most part and I had only one more to go after that. In the evening I did Assignment 4, which was about responding to a job advertisement and giving ourselves a critique on our progress for the whole course. I got it back within half an hour of handing it in on Tuesday and was told it was excellent, which was gratifying.

On Wednesday I was teaching my 60-minute lesson, the last big challenge of the course. The language point was on uses of the present perfect continuous form, and it went fine, or at least outwardly looked fine. I ended up skipping two or three sections of activities I'd planned because the time was eaten away. The lesson didn't really suffer for it, however. It was a relief to go home knowing I wouldn't have to teach in front of other teachers and trainees for the foreseeable future.

This morning we had two nice sessions. The first one was on teaching young learners, from children around 4 to young teenagers. In the session we were treated like children and made animal noises and played games. The second session was on using music and songs in the classroom, which involved playing a game where we were given words on slips of paper and had to stand up and sit down when we heard our word in the song.

In the afternoon, because I taught yesterday I was put into a different group to observe, which is the first time we've been able to observe outside of our own group of six. I was back in the Intermediate class where I'd started off three weeks ago. The atmosphere of the class seemed different, but it may have been more a result of the trainees' exhaustion than anything else. I didn't have to stay for the lengthier part of the post-match feedback, so I got home an hour earlier than usual, which was nice. And now there's only one more day before the end. This is, as they say, it.