First day of Teaching!

They don´t give you much time in my class here before they throw you into the deep end and see if you can swim. For example: Day 1-Introduction to teaching English, Day 2- Observation of experienced teacher, Day 3- First day of Teaching! Really that is just a very general outline of our days. During the morning hours (9am-2pm), we work on lesson plans and have ´input sessions´, where the our teacher here teaches us about teaching (did you catch all that?). Then we have lunch from 2-3, then teaching an English class from 3-5pm, & feedback for the lessons from 5-6:15pm. Then I stay and work on my lesson, write emails, or record my life here on this blog until 8, home by 9pm for dinner, more TEFL work until midnight, and finally bed! I realized today that I am gone from my house for about 12 hours each day, it´s kind of intense! Luckily we have a sweet balcony off of our classroom, so I can at least get some fresh (yet chilly) air in between sessions.

For our first day of teaching, we divided up the lesson on the HOME into 4 different sections: Lexis (vocab), Grammar, Listening, and Pronunciation. We each had 30 minutes to teach our section, and mine was pronunciation. I taught on sentence stress - for example, ´WHERE´S the BATHROOM?´ instead of ´where´s THE bathroom?´ (hopefully you can hear the difference...). I also had to teach the vowel sound in the word ¨where¨and ¨stair¨. Pronunciation is one of the most difficult things to teach spanish speakers, especially vowels because there are only 9 vowel sounds in spanish and over 20 in English. The last thing I taught on was the two different ways to pronounce ¨th¨, called voiced and unvoiced. For example, the ¨th¨in the words thy and thigh are pronounced differently. This was also a challenge, because neither of those sounds exist in spanish.

Anyway, enough teacher stuff, overall the lesson went really well. We had 4 adult students yesterday. It is a beginner class, but their levels of competency varied. Our class is just offered as a free English class, so anyone can come and we never really know how many students we will have because its not something that they need to sign up for or anything. We teach Monday -Thursday, alternating 2 students teaching a day. Next week we will continue with the beginner class, then the last two weeks of the course we will teach an advanced group of students. I love that there are only 4 of us ´student teachers´ because we get more classroom time and feedback. This class is a lot of work - lesson planning, grammar/phonology exercises, individual study - but I know all of it will come together to make me a great English teacher!