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.