Learning to Teach

We've been busy this week learning to set up lesson plans and doing practice teaching for each other. That has been an experience, in and of itself. The first day was very silly with us all giving the one who was teaching an extremely hard time by acting as if we were non-english speakers. We would say things like "what means cowboy?", "what means twigs?" and such. Since then we've become more serious, as now we're focusing on more difficult topics to teach such as grammar (we were teaching conversation the first day). We also received our schedules today. There are different topics of study, such as conversation, business, social studies, writing, grammar, etc. I have mostly conversation classes, no grammar classes (thankfully), a social studies class, a phrasal verbs class, a writing class, and a business class. All in all, we'll probably each be teaching 25 classes a week. For the first month, that number will be 20 classes. These are all the intensive classes which meet every day. Then later we'll be joined by "regular" classes, which meet twice a week. Each class is an hour long, so far as I can tell.

We have a great deal of work to do in preparation for classes. The school director wants us to give her a lesson plan for the whole year by next Monday, which is when classes start. The conversation classes are easy because we just follow the book, but the other classes will be more difficult, since there is no regular book to use. We have to gather information together from other books and use it in our class. It will be a challenge, but shouldn't be too bad.

I did some photography today from the windows of our school. It's in a very beautiful area, and I was blown away the first time I walked into the school (and even up to the school). This is the first year it's been in this building. I mentioned it was quite luxurious, and I was very serious with that comment.

Oh, this past Sunday we went on a hike with the church youth. We took a train out to a river in the country. It was maybe 2 hours away, and was very nice. The teachers found it very tiring, as we had been walking around Prague for the past several days, and were already exhausted, but it was still fun. We got to know Pavla, Petra, Eda, Tomaš (š is pronounced like "shh"), and 3 others who went with us. These are all important people, and as time goes by, you'll hear more about them.