Endings...and Beginnings

     Well. Today was my last day of the course. Officially, we graduate tomorrow, but I don't have to come in for class because I taught today, and I don't need to attend the job fair. That's right everyone, I have a job! Again, it's not quite official, but I received a job offer and have informally accepted it. I'll be teaching at a preschool here in Prague that also runs after school activities for school-age kids. Like most of the all-English preschools here, it's very expensive and the kids do yoga and take field trips, put on plays and celebrate various holidays (specifically: Czech, British, and American. Thanksgiving, anyone?). I have yet to actually visit the school, but I feel like this is the direction I'm being led in. I have never felt so much assurance as I have these last couple months. Everything is falling into place, and I have no doubt that I'm where I'm meant to be. I don't have an apartment yet, but I have a couch to crash on, and several possibilities floating around right now.
     Of course, with all this excitement about starting to live real lives here comes sadness that the family we've created over the past month is going to disperse. Endings are hard. I don't like endings. I especially don't like endings when it means saying goodbye to people I've only just started to open up to and have found to be wonderful people. Not that they weren't before, because of course they were. But, being an introvert, it takes me a while to open myself up to new faces, and let others see the crazy, poetic, naive, and optimistic person my family and friends know me as. That was just starting to happen, and now we're all leaving. Obviously, we're not all leaving Prague. In fact, most people are staying here, even those who thought originally that they were going to go elsewhere. But there are those who are moving away. And even those of us who are staying, it won't be nearly the same. We've grown used to seeing each other everyday in class, laughing over ridiculous grammar and eliciting techniques, cramming in last minute lesson prep together. There's just no way we can sustain that. We're going to have jobs, and live in different parts of the city. We're going to be real people.
     Leaving TEFL tomorrow, certificate in hand (because I did pass, y'all. Grammar test and everything.) is going to be hard. It has been such an eye-opening month, both personally and professionally (if you'll allow me to call a job I have yet to start my profession). I've learned so much, and grown in ways I cannot even begin to describe.
     I'm going to borrow an analogy from Virginia Woolf, if I may. In "Mrs. Dalloway", Richard talks about strings that connect people to each other, and the further away you go, the tighter they stretch, until, for most people, they inevitably break. I love that thought, that we're connected to people by stretchy strings. But I don't like the part about them breaking. The tugs of the strings are thousands of times better than not having them at all, or having lost them to time and distance. So I'm going to do my best to keep that from happening. I cannot stand the idea of losing you all so soon after having found you. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. Let's not allow those strings to break. Let's keep them strong. Change is inevitable, but that doesn't mean everything has to rearrange itself. We all have plenty of room in our hearts. Let's keep each other there. If that means travelling to various places around the world in order to see each other so be it. I guess I can live with that.
    

A Day in the Life

Here's a typical day in the life of a TEFL Worldwide student:

Wake up around 7:30 or 8. Class doesn't start until 10, so I can wake up gradually and generally get my life together before heading downstairs for class. We literally live 30 feet and 4 stories from school, so we can get there in about 2 minutes, unlike the people who live in the villa. The actual apartments are much nicer, but they live 15 minutes and a giant hill away. Score one for the attic.

Class starts at 10. We start in the room upstairs, and never know what lesson we're going to have until one of the instructors, Dan or Kenny comes in and starts teaching us. It could be a demo lesson where we experience a lesson like the ones we teach. Those come in several varieties: reading, writing, listening, speaking, vocabulary, and grammar. It could be a Czech lesson, although we knew there would only ever be three of those and they're now all done. It could be a lesson on the technical side of English. Today for example, we had one lesson on connected speech and the crazy things native English speakers do with their pronunciation when talking fluently. It's absurd. Then we had a lesson on the Perfect aspect of grammar (if you're wondering, the perfect is when you use 'to have' + past participle. You can have Present Perfect Simple, Present Perfect Continuous, Past Perfect Simple, or Past Perfect Continuous forms, all with slightly different uses. I had a headache when we left.). Our lessons could also be on things like classroom management, intelligence types, or business English. This week, we spent Tuesday and Wednesday listening to each other give 15 minute presentations on various grammar. Mine was on using the Past Continuous/Past Simple for talking about interrupted past events. Bucketful of laughs, that is.

After an hour and a half lesson we get a 20 minute break before heading back inside for session #2.
Is it weird that I'm actually enjoying this stuff? Grammar is fun! Granted, by the end of a massive grammar lesson, my head hurts, but I get it, mostly. And I'm such a language nerd that I'm just drinking this all in. I don't know how much I'll use it when teaching, but I haven't once been tempted to drop the course.

Lunch comes at 13:30. If it's one of your two days off per week, congratulations! You're done for the day! If you're teaching, you have an hour before needing to be back at school, ready for three hours of lessons with native Czech speakers who pay a pittance to be taught by teachers-in-training. We've had the same teaching team since day one of the course. There are three of us, and we'll each teach one 50 minute lesson and observe the other two, taking notes for later feedback, of course. Most of the time there will also be a trainer in the room, observing you and grading you on your teaching. In order to pass the course you have to pass 3 out of 5 observed lessons (among other things).

Then after teaching and getting feedback, you get your material for the next lesson and they send you home to use up whatever free time you might have had. Next week, the last week of the course (this is insane. How are we even this close to being done? I don't get it.), we have a 10 page assignment due about our one-on-one student, two lesson plans, and another grammar presentation (this time about the difference between 'some' and 'any' when discussing quantity). Oh. And a grammar test. And then we're done, and they throw us into the world with nothing but a certificate made out of a thin sheet of paper and reams of handouts, used up lesson plans, and comment sheets. This is definitely one of the hardest, most time consuming TEFL courses out there, but it's completely worth it. Several of my classmates already have jobs, a week and a half before graduation, and others have had interviews right and left. It sounds like I'm practicing for the testimonial party tomorrow night, doesn't it? Oh well. I can live with that. I'm so happy I decided to come here.

Poetry

     I love Prague. I really do. I'm having the time of my life here. I didn't realize how much I missed being a student until I found myself back in the world of studying, assignments, and yes, homework. I love the camaraderie of students, the act of flipping through books looking for answers. It's part of who I am. I know now that I'll never be able to get away from that. And really, would you want to stop learning? Would you want stop challenging yourself to think in new ways? I wouldn't. Academia is, and always will be part of my life, and I'm certainly fulfilling that need right now.
    My first two lessons went well. We'll have to teach seven altogether, five of them will be observed, and in order to get the certificate, you have to pass at least three. So far I've taught twice, been observed twice, and passed twice. It's a huge relief knowing that I can pass even my earliest attempts and that (hopefully) my lessons will only get stronger. I've had a blast, even with my grammar lesson today on different uses of auxiliary verbs. After class, I met with the student I'll see for my one-on-one assignment. He's a lovely older man who reads books in French, speaks at least four languages very well, and spoke of philosophy. It was very easy to talk to him for an hour, and I'm looking forward to seeing him again on Sunday. I'm not looking forward to having to analyze his skills, but at least I was paired with someone I know I'll get on with. So overall, school is going well. I've learned more about how stupid English is in a week and a half than I have in the entirety of my life. I simply cannot imagine how anyone ever learns to speak, read or write it. I'm enjoying my classes, for the most part. Some are obviously more compelling than others, but that's going to be the case with any course you take. I'm really happy with my choice to study here.
    But there's another part of me that's having trouble expressing itself: my poetical side. I noticed this most acutely on Saturday when a group of my classmates went down into the city center for a flea market and then split into smaller groups to wander around the city. I was in a very dreamy mood; both my mind and body felt very light, like I could sprout wings and soar over the red roofed buildings. When I'm with my very best friends, this part of me is amplified, and at that moment, walking along the river with three new friends, I wanted nothing more than to have one of them there with me. All the people here are wonderful. I couldn't ask for any better classmates, honestly. But I don't know any of them well enough to throw myself into the world with them, like I was longing to do. I wanted to throw my arms out, twirl around in circles, and just laugh for the joy of the simple Prague-ness of our lives now. I needed whimsy, I needed poetry.
     Life here so far is very prose-y. The people are prose-y, the very nature of our program (learning grammar, teaching techniques) is prose-y. And I appreciate prose. I love prose, the misleading simplicity of it, the unexpected depth of its sentences. I spent three years in school loving and reveling in prose. But I have poetry in me too, and right now I feel very unbalanced. I want poetry, to dance into castles singing silly Beatles songs. I want poetry, to marvel over boys with bright red socks and hallways that are brilliantly white (I'm imagining what some of my friends here might say if I were to exclaim over red socks and giggling). I want poetry, to embrace the absolute absurdity of being here, and my fears of waking up to realize it's only a dream. I want poetry, to fall desperately in love with playgrounds that float just beneath a castle, and streets that wind away into the unknown.
     I'm happy here, but it's in a very prosaic, filtered way. I want to see the world with rose-colored glasses, to have so much fun that people think I'm drunk, when really I'm only drunk on life. I want people who don't need to be in an altered state to act this way. This is what I miss most about you, dearest friends (and you know who you are). Of course I miss your beautiful faces and the depth of conversation that only comes from loving someone for so long, but those things can be simulated long-distance. The whimsical spirits missing from my life are impossible to recreate. I cannot explain it any more clearly than that. I haven't lost hope of finding someone here, but it could never be the same. So, come! Come visit, and we'll fall in love with life all over again, together.

Prague

Vltava River, with the castle.

Dancing Building

Prague Castle

First Day of School

     Dobrý den! Jmenuji se Meta. Jak se máte?
     This was the content of our first lesson. Besides teaching us grammar, giving us demonstrations of the kinds of lessons we should be giving, and education theory, we're also receiving Czech lessons taught entirely in Czech. The point, which is a good one I think, is that having those lessons will help us to understand how our students will be feeling when we're teaching them English entirely in English. It also proved that it is possible to learn a language without needing instruction in your own. We learned to say, spell, and understand the above words without the instructor saying a single word of English. If you're interested, it means "Hello! My name is Meta. How are you?" We also learned: "What is your name? (Jak se jmenujete?)", "I'm good. (Dobr̆e.)", "I'm bad. (S̆patnĕ.)", and "Goodbye. (Nashledanou.)" There's no point in trying to convey pronunciation. Anyway, it was a very effective lesson, and a much better opening to the course than the other one we received yesterday. That one was exactly what you'd expect to see on the first day of any class. We went over the expectations, what we were going to be doing, and how we were going to be graded. It served very well to prove that this is not going to be a month of coasting through coursework. It's going to be a lot of work, but they promised that if we put the effort in, it could be one of the most rewarding experiences of our lives. I believe both parts; it's going to be really hard, but I'm also anticipating learning a lot and having fun doing it.
     After lunch we had our first demo lesson where we experienced an English reading lesson. This is nothing like the reading tutoring I was doing this past year. These people are mostly adults, and can already read in their native language. It's not like they don't know how to put letters together to form words or don't understand that combinations of letters have certain meanings. They're literate. What they can't do is read efficiently in English. They can't skim for main ideas, they may have trouble gleaning nuance, and their comprehension may not be the best. So that's what they're learning: how to be a skilled, fluent reader.

     The demo started out with a vocabulary lesson in which he introduced a bunch of seemingly random, mostly British slang words, but which turned out to be important words in the article we eventually read. He then showed us a picture of an old Skoda car, a car with a dreadful reputation, and asked us why it might be worth 46,000 pounds (about 80,000 dollars). After hearing our guesses he handed us an article that had been written about this crappy old car. Turns out, this particular won the 1959 Leningrad Grand Prix, and then was the vehicle in which a young Czech student escaped from behind the Iron Curtain during the Prague Spring revolution. We skimmed, scanned, comprehended, and role played, all enforcing the lesson's objectives. Besides reading, we wrote a little, and did a lot of speaking to each other. 

     Finally, we were put into groups to plan our very first lesson, which we were going to teach the next day (that's today, if you've gotten a bit lost). We received an elementary level article about riding buses in Pakistan which we were responsible for teaching to a small group of adult students just beginning to learn English. I won't bore you with our process, which was very labored, considering none of the three of us had ever planned lessons before. But we managed, and the trainer said he thought it looked great. But planning and execution are never quite the same thing. The lesson today went alright. It could have gone much better, but it also could have gone much worse. For a first teach ever, I'm pretty happy with it.

     I was surprised I wasn't more nervous than I actually was. I expected to be breaking out in a cold sweat the whole morning, and then be nearly comatose while my partners did their sections. But I was basically fine. I had a few small butterflies, but nothing even close to overwhelming. I think that means I'm in the right place. I'm feeling really good about this whole thing. The teaching practice is the part I was most worried about, but I've gotten my feet wet and didn't drown, so I feel like anything more can just get better. Even immediately afterwards, I was able to say with complete honesty that I had had fun talking with these people about buses, even if their English was very low, and we didn't really accomplish our aims as well as we might have wanted. It was fun. I enjoyed it. Tomorrow my group has a much higher group, the upper intermediates, for a writing lesson. Who knows what they're going to throw at us on Thursday and Friday. Maybe I should wait until then to make my final call on how I feel about this course. But I have a feeling that though I might never again have the level of inexplicable calm I had today, I'm still going to enjoy it. I can't shake the feeling that this is where I'm supposed to be right now.

Orienting

     Yesterday, Sunday, we had our first official scheduled activity. We met in the hotel lobby for a walking tour of the Prague city center (or centrum, if you're trying to learn Czech). It was the first time the whole group was together, and I, at least was excited to meet the other people I'd be spending the whole month with. Having gone out to dinner with a smaller group the night before, the multitude of names weren't as daunting as they could have been, but I'm still nowhere near an expert.
     We took the Metro (subway) to a stop near the Senate building, partway up the hill to the castle, then walked the rest of the way up. If you've ever been to Prague, you know the castle sits on top of a large, fairly steep hill. It's certainly bigger and steeper than anything I'm used to in Minnesota. Add in the fact that it was about 95 degrees and humid, and it was not a super pleasant walk. Getting to the top of the hill was beautiful though, in more ways than one. Not only were we basically done climbing the massive hill, the view out over Prague were spectacular. It is a city of red roofs, spires, and weirdly modern Soviet buildings that simply throw the rest of the architecture into greater relief. There were hordes of tourists milling around, which made me feel less awkward about being a member of a large group myself. Large groups are not something I do well, especially in that particular setting. I feel that in order to really see a place you have to go on your own, or better yet, with someone who thinks similarly to you, and just look, not listen to a running commentary of who built what and when and why. That's just not helpful. Perhaps later after having seen something already, such facts could be relevant, but going in to St Vitus' (the major cathedral in the castle grounds) and only thinking about how much it cost to build the thing does more harm than good. There's very little reverence in such an attitude. But maybe that's just me. The point of all of this was that I didn't take any pictures. There were too many people for them to be good pictures anyway, and I'm planning on going back to really drink it all in.
     After seeing the castle, and wandering down the hill and across the Charles Bridge to Old Town Square, all very hot and full of people, Jakub, our guide, led us to a pub/restaurant that he said would be able to accommodate our group. As it turns out, although they were physically able to do so, they were unwilling and turned us back out on the street. That would happen precisely nowhere in America. So we split into smaller groups to find dinner. Six of us ended up at a quiet little pizza restaurant, which was absolutely delicious. We each ate an entire pizza and stayed for over an hour. It was the first time I had really talked to anyone other than my two roommates, and it was lovely getting to know other people. While we were there it started pouring rain, which was most welcome as it cooled the air down considerably. At about the same moment, the three of us who live in the attic all realized that all of our windows in our apartments were open and all of our stuff was getting pelted with water. But there was nothing we could do about it, so we just laughed it off, hoping our electronics were safe. Afterwards, we walked through the rain back to the Metro station, bringing us back home. After the rain stopped the air was cool and blissful after the sweltering heat of the rest of the day. We watched the sun go down and the sky turn all kinds of colors. So gorgeous. I slept with a shirt on last night, and under the covers, neither of which had happened yet. Such a wonderful ending to a great day.
     Aside from getting acquainted with the city that will be our home for the next month if not longer, we were also getting acquainted with each other. Watching the entire group interact was hilarious. Throwing a bunch of young adults together provides opportunities for a wide variety of relationships, and even just hours into our knowing each other, it was clear who was going to gravitate to whom. Everyone here is really nice and very friendly, but obviously there is a wide range of personalities. Here's a rundown of the group, as I understand it. They must have added several people pretty recently, because there's about 28 of us, and there were only about 24 in the email we got about a month ago. The vast majority are Americans, but there's a couple Canadians and Brits, one Aussie, and one Czech. The range of experience is huge. Some people have been substitute teaching for several years, others are fresh out of high school. There's one guy who's been teaching art in the United Arab Emirates for a couple years. It's a wildly diverse group of people, and I'm so excited to get to know them. If yesterday was any indication, it's going to be a great month.
     We also had our first day of class today, but this is already too long, and I want to do it justice, so I'll try and get something up tomorrow, after teaching for the first time. You did read that correctly. We're teaching a lesson on our second day of class. More about that later. For now, let it suffice that today was great, and that after a grocery run I finally have some vegetables. At this point, that's all I really need. I haven't had proper veggies for what seems like ages. I'm ready for a great big salad. Back soon with an update about school, both as student and teacher!

First Impressions

     Well, I'm here! After 22 hours, 4 airports, 3 airplanes, and 3 countries, I'm in my apartment in Prague. It still doesn't really make sense that this is actually what's happening. After saying my goodbyes spread over the past week, and my family yesterday morning, I knew I was leaving. How could I not? I had three bags packed with stuff, and that was only after taking things out that I really wanted to bring. I guess I'll just have to wait for a package. Not that a second long-sleeve shirt or black blazer are really necessary right now. It's hotter here than in Minneapolis. The taxi temperature read 38 degrees. Obviously, I'm going to have to get used to a new scale. 38 here does not mean the same thing as 38 at home.
     I have yet to really do anything here, considering I'm exhausted from the trip and about to faint from hunger because my stomach won't tolerate hardly anything when I'm flying. So far, I've met one other student who arrived about the same time I did, so we got shown our rooms at the same time, and received a welcome packet from the school. Official stuff starts Sunday afternoon with an orientation walk around the city, but I'm so glad I got here today. By Sunday jet lag will have worn off entirely, and I'll be an actual functioning human being again.
     Here are my first impressions of Prague, derived entirely from the 45 minute cab ride from the airport to the hotel/apartment building. First of all, it's a real city. This may seem silly and obvious, but when I'm visiting someplace, it's sometimes hard for me to remember that this isn't just a tourist destination, people live here, people have jobs here (hopefully I will soon), people go to school here. There was road construction to rival Minnesota, people were waiting for buses and doing other normal, everyday things. Secondly, it's still PRAGUE. All this normal, everyday activity is going on in the midst of one of the greatest, most beautiful cities in Europe, if not the world.  This hit me as the taxi drove over the river and Prague Castle was right there, just hanging out. It was perfect. The sky was a brilliant blue, and the castle stood out, just like on a postcard. I'm so excited to see how these two aspects of the city come together in my life. Finally, the history of this city is so evident. My guidebooks talk about how there are various architectural styles represented, but there's really nothing but driving through the city that will convince you're truly in an historical place. There are art deco buildings, obviously Soviet era buildings, bright modern glass constructions, very old cathedrals, and churches/chapels even older than that.
     When Abbie and I were here two and a half years ago, I labeled Prague unorthodox in my arbitrary, but thoughtful one word descriptions of cities. I don't know yet if I was right, or way off the mark. It'll be interesting go back to that post and read what I wrote then, now that I'm back. What would be even better would be to forget that I was ever here before, form new opinions, and then at the end of the month (which is the only definite time frame I can commit to right now) look back at the me from 2011 writing about Prague.
     I don't know if you can tell, but I'm extremely excited to be here.