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.