getting there - by Theo

One week to go of the Spring Term and I feel as if I'm on the verge of reaching a tipping point, upon which everything will become much easier (or possibly much harder, but in other ways). Planning has become quick, easy and relatively stress free. While not every lesson goes to plan - several Year 9 students are still trying to test my resolve to make them work, by hook or by crook - the majority do. My marking work load has grown, but I'm getting quicker and more focussed in that area too. My do list is gradually shortening, with a few long-standing items finally ticked off. I feel that I am not bending the the truth when I reply in the affirmative to yet another query from a random pupil as to whether I am a 'real' teacher. It's all starting to gel.

So much so in fact that I felt able to take most of yesterday off: I spent the morning baking with Rosie while Kate hit a newly new sale, then we all headed off for a delicious brunch with Tom and Claire in Long Ashton, followed by a walk in the beautiful sunshine to the local play park. My life is slowly returning. Fabulous.

Half-term by Theo

Oh how I was looking forward to half-term. I mean this is what it's all about being a teacher - the fact that you work like mad most weeks is made up for by the fact that you get 13 weeks holiday (or thereabouts) a year. It's one of the perks.

Actually, scrap that, it's the only perk!

Anyway, I had plans for this half-term. Aside from getting to spend time with Rosie and Kate, I was going to go out, see some gigs, meet friends. It was going to be great.

Then I saw the size of my marking pile.
Then I remembered I had an EPS assignment presentation to give the wednesday after we got back.
Then suddenly it was Saturday and, having not left the house for 48 hours in bid to get it all done, I realised I had to teach next week too, so had better start planning some lessons.

This trainee teacher's half-term report thus reads: Issues with time management continue to hamper his efforts to have a life. Must do better.

because it's worth it - by Theo

I was asking whether the sacrifices and stresses of the course were worth it, and the answer is: yes. I'm really, really enjoying the teaching. It's hard work, which some of the concepts proving to be an intellectual challenge, while controlling the students is an even bigger one. But on the days when I pretty much just teach, whizzing from one class to another, it is such a buzz, especially when the students come up with something even better than you'd hoped for.

Mind you, I'm not so into it that a day back at Uni -with a 9.30 start and a 3.30 finish- didn't feel like a holiday!

first observation - by Theo

Today I had my first observation by my University Tutor, a man who has trained at least one person in every English Department west of Reading (or so it seems - he's been at the University's Education Department for 25 years). This was a formal observation which would count towards my final grade. So no pressure then.

Actually I wasn't feeling too much pressure. I'd been observed by somebody in the 15 or so classes I had taught prior to today (plus loads as an EFL teacher), so wasn't feeling too unnerved at the prospect of having somebody commenting on my every utterance. Plus I always try to keep in mind that it is through being observed and reflecting on the comments you get back that you learn. So, bring it on.

I was teaching a Year 10 class that I had taught twice before. Their aim at the end of the unit is to write a review of the film, Jaws, and after two classes looking at how film makers use camera angles and sound to create tension, we were now looking at effective language use in reviews. The class went well. Not brilliantly, but a bit more than OK. It wasn't inaccessibly hard, but it wasn't a stroll in the park for them either. They behaved. They learned (something). We finished on time. It was alright.

I've still got loads to do. Both my Associate Tutor (who was quite nervous as it's her first year as an AT and she had to give her feedback first - so essentially she was being observed too!) and University Tutor were complimentary and thought I was doing better than they might expect at this point in the PGCE course. They were really pleased with my planning and consideration of the needs of individual students; I've my EFL experience to thank for that I guess. But there is plenty of room for me to improve, with a few of the things being:

• I need to think about how to get the students to reflect on their work, to realise what they have learned.
• I need to cut down the amount of Teacher Talk and build in more steps to the tasks so the students can guide themselves through with minimum input from me.
• Leaving space for individual work and only doing group work if there is a real point to it.

It's that last point where my EFL background isn't helping. "Discuss with your partner" is such a CELTA staple - language is communicative, and when teaching English as a Foreign Language, just getting students to talk to each other and convey meaning can be a learning objective and outcome all on its own. In contrast, times when EFL students write in silence for 15 minutes or more are rare. So changing what my view of what learning looks like is going to be crucial.

Teaching as Parenting - by Theo

On the Bristol PGCE course many demands are made of us as trainee English teachers. We have to have a wide-ranging knowledge and understanding of the literary canon (and alternative canons). Our knowledge of English grammar and morphology must be sufficiently strong to teach English Language A level. We may be called upon to teach Media Studies and Drama classes, and so must be well grounded in both the theory and practice of those subjects. We need to keep up to date with the latest strategies, guidelines and statutory requirements issued by the Government, LEAs and exam boards. On top of all this, we have to understand how children learn to speak, read and write from a baby's earliest days through to adulthood. It's this last aspect that, as a parent to 21 month-old Rosie, I find most fascinating.

Most parents teach their children to speak more or less unconsciously: they talk to their child, and the child learns. Kate and I have of course made the conscious decision to teach Rosie to speak Spanish - neither of us are native speakers yet I speak to her in Spanish and we try to expose her to the language through books and a playgroup. So, having researched bilingualism, we were already slightly more aware of the processes by which children acquire language, but we are even more so now. I feel that as a parent I've got a huge advantage over my peers as I can see, day by day, the theory being put into practice as Rosie's vocabulary and syntax expands. As a parent it's amazing understanding (more or less) what is going on, and it'll be even more amazing once she starts to read (the alphabet: she already 'reads' images), to be able to understand how she is doing it and why she makes the mistakes she will inevitably make.

However, in other ways being a student teacher and also a parent are not so great. This week my lesson planning and marking workload suddenly exploded, so this weekend has been mostly spent in front of the computer writing lesson plans. Indeed I haven't left the house since I got back at 5pm on Friday. Poor Rosie has been at a loss as to why Daddy hasn't been able to take her to the park, as he usually does at weekends, or why he hasn't been keen to let her bang the keys on the laptop. For the first time on the PGCE (and sadly I suspect not the last) I've felt that being a teacher and a parent don't mix, as trying to do both simultaneously simply meant I did neither as well as I would like.

On the last point though I may well be wrong. One of the many essays (Teaching as assisted performance) I've read for my PGCE assignments concludes that in order to be better teachers, we must be more like parents. The authors (Tharp & Gallimore) make the point that the vast majority of parents are extremely successful teachers, instructing their children, usually unconsciously, in language, social skills, spatial awareness, movement and many other things. While acknowledging that behaving like a parent is rarely, if ever, possible within an educational system that crams 30 students into a single classroom, there is definitely something to be said for this approach.

So perhaps I should walk into my new Year 10 class on Wednesday wielding a couple of snooker balls stuffed inside a sock yelling "Who's your daddy now!?"

Maybe not.

First classes - by Theo

While not quite as swift as the CELTA, which had us teaching on the very first day, the Bristol PGCE course does whip us into classrooms pretty quickly, and today I taught my first full lessons to a Year 7 class & a Year 8 one.

Rosie obviously knew something was up. She must have caught the general buzz of excitement and anticipation, and was clearly thrilled for me. So much so that she felt she had to wake up at 1 am to let me know just how excited she was. And then again at 2 am. And again at 4.30 am. So, thanks to my darling daughter's enthusiasm for my fledgling secondary school career, I went into school on about 3 hours sleep.

Great.

The first class, the Year 7s, were third period after break. Having been in the school for nearly three weeks now they've got to know me a bit. I've been observing in their classes across the curriculum and had helped out in their class earlier in the week delivering sections of the lesson. So I figured it would go OK. And I guess it did. It was no shining triumph, but no disaster either. The class looked at the construction of character through dialogue in Skellig, particularly through the use of types of questions. The problem was that I was too ambitious in what I was trying to teach them and, being a mixed ability class, this meant that some of them were very confused by the end. I hope this won't have put them off - classroom management is a lot about the students trusting you and the activities you set. Too many activities which they just don't get and I'll lose that trust.

Year 8. Period 5. The tiredness was starting to bite. We were looking at Holes by Louis Sachar, and I had another ambitious lesson planned involving identifying literary devices (alliteration, onomatopoeia, etc), creative writing and textual comparisons. All in an hour during the last lesson of the day with a class who had become convinced I was stalking them. I threw myself at it. It felt great. We whizzed along taking nearly everyone with us, and many of the students going way beyond what I'd hoped for. We were flying, ahead of time. A couple of students, who through laziness rather than lack of comprehension had barely written a word, could have perhaps done with more time, but with ten minutes to go we'd basically finished what I'd planned. So we quickly whipped out the book and read through another chapter before the bell went and the adrenaline faded. Phew. What a high.

Afterwards my tutor commented that she felt the ending lacked a little something. It needed a chance for the students to talk about what they'd learned. That's when I turned over my four-page long lesson plan to realise I'd left out half of my final activity, which would have done exactly that.

Bugger.

You live, you learn. At least that's what I hope my students will do.

TEFL no more - by Theo

Today marks something like the end of an era for me; not only was it my last day at the Clifton language school where I've been working these last two months (more on that later), but also my last day for the foreseeable future as an EFL teacher. No longer will I be teaching English as a foreign language to foreign students; from now on I'll be teaching it to native speakers.

It's been quite a journey. It was 3 years ago that Kate and I decided we wanted the amazing adventure of our honeymoon travels in Sheena to continue and that we weren't going to return to Bristol or indeed the UK. So casting around for some means of supporting ourselves while living overseas, we enrolled on a CELTA course in Barcelona. We loved it, both of us really enjoying the reality of the classroom and the challenge of meeting the learners' needs. So when I found a job in Madrid, we headed back to the UK for Christmas to fill up the van with more of our things for the move to Spain.

Things have changed dramatically since then; Sheena's long since gone to a new home, Rosie has arrived and we've moved back to Bristol - but my job as an English Teacher has stayed a constant. I've really loved it. Sure there have been days when I haven't exactly bounced into the class full of enthusiasm, but generally I've been lucky enough to have keen, motivated students willing to participate in whatever crazy activity or bizarre discussion I've concocted for them. Some have even had the decency to laugh at my jokes!

My Spanish students in Madrid were always lovely and I remember them fondly. However, my experience these past two months teaching at a language school in Clifton on their summer program is that Spanish students, along with Turkish ones, are the absolute worst at slipping into their native tongue at the earliest opportunity. It's been quite the Tower of Babel in my classes at times, with a new intake every Tuesday and students staying for anything from 2 weeks to 7 months, but at one stage I had a class with one student each from: Germany, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Switzerland, Taiwan and Turkey. Not much opportunity there for them to chat in languages other than English! But allow two Spanish or Turkish students to sit next to each other and they would slip into their mother tongue as soon as your back was turned. The Swiss (especially the German speaking ones) were by far and away the best at keeping to English - one pair, who were in an optional class on British Life & Culture I was running, were best friends from back home, yet when I passed them in the street one day I was amazed to hear them speaking to each other in English. That's dedication!

My main class - which also had a lot of Swiss - was also pretty good and we celebrated the last morning (all but one were also leaving that day too) by carrying out a survey of Clifton cafes (English in use), debating their relative merits and then testing our conclusions with breakfast in the Primrose Cafe - which was just as good as I remembered. They were a lovely bunch of students with a real drive to learn, and while I didn't get to know them like some of my students in Madrid (well, most had only been here for a month or less) I'll miss them.


Naturally, I don't expect to get students with quite such high levels of motivation in the next stage of my teaching career, my PGCE, which starts in 3 weeks. Hell, I'll probably be pleading for a class of Spaniards come October...

How to humiliate yourself in public... just like that! - by Theo

Some months ago I decided to do a fun lesson for some of my younger students by basing it on a magic trick. This magic trick to be exact, whereby you guess the other person's chosen card by simply dealing out 21 cards in a certain way three times. As a trick it requires no skill or preparation, you just have to be able to follow the instructions (the point of the lesson - reading for gist); a six year old could do it.

This morning my former students Javier messaged me to ask if I wanted to come with him and his friend Lucia to a magic show in Ventas after work. Great! I hadn't seen Javi for a while and I've always enjoyed seeing magic; for me it's a win-win situation - when you can work out how they did the trick you feel pleased with yourself, and when you can't you just feel amazed.

The show turned out to be at a small magic school, some kind of end-of-term graduating ceremony for recent students, hosted by one of the teachers. The performance space was small, with barely twenty of us seated in three tiers. This kind of intimacy was necessary for the show as the majority of the performers were doing card tricks, with the 3 of hearts making repeated appearances. This may have been intended, as by the end it had become a kind of running joke.

Pretty much every performer - there were about 9 - asked for at least one volunteer to shuffle the deck, chose a card, check the table and so on, so it was kind of inevitable that eventually my turn to be called upon would come around.

In the end it was the compere who called me up and, after checking I understood Spanish, decided to score a cheap laugh by handing me the deck of cards and announcing "y ahora, de ingleterra, el magnifico Theo!" and retiring from the stage. Great.

I probably should have just sat down again. Or given him back the cards. He was really stretching the timing of his little joke a lot and the stage was becoming a vacuum. Then I remembered the class I had done. "Fine" I thought, "I'll do a trick." It was an easy trick - a six year old could follow the instructions. Except I didn't have the instructions.

As was kind of inevitable, I screwed up the trick. However, I like to think I did so with a sense of comic timing and I was certainly rewarded with laughter that I feel was, on the whole, with me rather than at me. The irony is that if the compere had called on Javi, who was sitting next to me, he would have actually got some magic - Javi is an excellent amateur magician. Anyway, I said to Javi I'd go with him another time, and this time I'm damn well going to practice in advance!

One student...

... and they weren't even one of mine!!

Yesterday was our first day back at work, but thanks to a combination of blizzard conditions in Madrid and the fact that it was the day after Los Reyes and many people were still other of town in their family Pueblos, my four scheduled classes yielded just one student! To add to the irony, she wasn't even my student! Thanks to even worse blizzard conditions in the UK, two teachers didn't make it back in time for the start of term, so the one student I taught was in a class I was covering for a colleague stranded in England!

Oh well, I've now got lessons planned up until next Wednesday, so it wasn't a complete waste.

new beginnings

This weekend heralds something of a fresh start for Kate and I in Spain. After nearly two weeks of job-less, home-less limbo enjoy the wonderful hospitality of our friends Kirsty and Juanmi in Vaciamadrid, we are about to move into a new flat and start new jobs.

We exchanged contracts on a lovely 2 bedroom apartment in Cuidad Lineal earlier this morning. Our new landlord and landlady are an elderly couple who live on the floor below, the flat used to be their son´s and their duaghter lives directly below us. Very much a family affair! It´s got everything we need, is reasonably close to the Metro and the surrounding area seems to be quite quiet while still hosting several lively looking bars and lots of amenities. Ironically enough it´s very close to the academy I was teaching at last term though, while I was very happy there, I´m glad we´ve moved.

The advantages of switching academies were immediately apparent when we recieved our timetables. Knocking off at 9pm rather than 10pm makes a huge difference and the kids classes last 50 minutes instead of 1 hour 20, which is going to be a hell of a lots more bearable. As the students will be drawn from the poshest barrio in town (Salamanca) they should also, theoretically, be better behaved than the monsters I was marshalling last term. In addition much of the lesson planning is done for us in advance; we just have to fine tune the plans provided to suit our own styles. However, the biggest benefit of our new posts is the 3 day weekends we get every other, we share two staurday classes with another teacher and never work fridays. We´re already thinking about some weekends away in Delilah...

we'll miss you...

Yesterday I waved goodbye to my first job here in Spain - for 6 months I've been teaching at a language academy in Pueblo Nuevo, but in October Kate and I are starting new jobs at a different academy in O'Donnell. Thursday night saw me making repeated trips to local bars with my adult students as we toasted the end of the academic year and said goodbyes (mostly in Spanish). All of my students said they were sad I was leaving and that they had been hoping that I was going to be their teacher the following year. I, rather disloyally, suggested that if they really wanted to continue in my class they could always move academies with me:

"Where is your new academy?"
"It's in O'Donnell - 6 metro stops away."
"Oh no, that's too far. I come here because it is so near my house."

They aren't going to miss me that much then!!

depressing things about teaching (no.53)

The lack of initiative, gumption and imagination in some of my kids' classes is quite astounding. (Only in the field of learning English that is - when it comes to cheating at tests, kicking each other under the table or disrupting the class they are incredibly imaginative, if not terribly subtle.)

This week in my kids' classes we have been revising the use of "going to" to express the future (e.g. I am going to play tennis this weekend.) They have already learned this point in class; they have already been tested on it in fact, and set copious amounts of homework on it. It should be relatively easy for them to understand - they have virtually the same expression in Spanish - yo voy a juegar tenis este fin de semana (although that does literally translate as "I go to play tennis this weekend"). However, they still don't quite get it, so I planned a 90 minute lesson to help them revise the area.

We did listening exercises, we did speaking exercises, we put the grammar points up on the board, we did reading exercises and even writing exercises. Up, down, left, right - every way we could use "I'm going to do/go/play/eat/etc" we did. Finally, to end the class I gave them the lyrics to Pink's song "So what" and asked them to fill in the gaps. The gaps - as astute readers might have guessed - were all linked to "going to" constructions.

Eg:
I'm __________ to drink my money,
I'm not going _________ his rent,
_____ going to start a fight

Now, even if you've never heard the song, you could probably guess the words that go in those gaps, and I was hoping the kids would also be able to fill in half the gaps before playing the song - just to make sure I had actually left the phrase "I'm going to pay" on the board along with the grammar rules for forming the future with "to go".

After two plays of the song most of the class had blank sheets and even blanker faces - if they'd written anything it was probably either "go" or "pay" (no "to"). It was fair enough if they didn't understand the song, or if they lost their place in the lyrics, but I just couldn't understand how, after 90 minutes, they didn't have the gumption to take a wild guess that "going" would be followed by "to" and preceeded by either "I'm" or "He's".

Fortunately I'd completed all their report cards the week before, or I might have written some very caustic comments.

Work

After nearly 9 months without a day job, the first week back as a wage-earner has been as good as a holiday - relaxing and traveling can really take it out of you!! In all seriousness, it has been mildly uncomfortable to have to answer the question (repeatedly asked over the last year) of "What do you?" with "Sod all - I scrounge off my wife's savings" so it feels nice to once again be contributing!

My working week is hardly arduous - 23 teaching hours plus 3 paid preparation hours is as full-time as most teaching jobs get here in Spain. I start work at 4pm in Pueblo Nuevo, a 35 minute Underground ride away, finishing at 10pm except on Friday when we all finish at 7.30pm before a mandatory staff meeting in the nearest tapas bar. I'm teaching all ages from 9 to 13 year olds, teenagers and adult classes of various abilities, seeing each class twice a week for 90 minutes at a time. As some classes share syllabusses this effectively means 9 classes a week, which, with the aid of thoughtfully provided text books, I seem to have got down to about 30 mins preparation time per class. Most of the other teachers have expressed amazement at this: "Plan? What's that?" has been their frequent comment. In time, I too aspire to their level of professionalism!

I take it all back...

They offered us a job! Not actually the one we were being interviewed for but a very similar one. They offered it to both of us and asked us to choose - so now I'm working for them!

Ha!

Kate was promptly offered another job, but she ended up turning it down as the hours meant we would never have seen each other. Not to worry as she has a couple of interviews arranged for when we get back.

Job Hunting

It's been 5 years since I last went job hunting - I thought that was a long time until I realised that Kate hasn't had to look for work for 15 years! Sure there have been internal applications and interviews - I had to apply for my own job not that long ago - but it is still a very alien process for us. As a result we're probably going about it all wrong. Scratch that, we're definitely going about it all wrong! Here we are in France sending off applications for English Teaching jobs in Madrid and being consequently unavailable for interview when potential employers get back to us wondering when we can come by the office!

However, after finding a useful agency's email on a notice board, we did manage to squeeze in one interview before we left Spain. Boy was that strange! It was a bit of a pain in the first place, being scheduled for 6pm on the last day of Vaughan Town at Barco de Avila - we had planned to head straight for France, but instead we frantically changed plans and scrambled to find somewhere to stay on a holiday weekend when most Madrilenos were heading out of town. Thank goodness for lovely Olga and Fernando, whose hospitality frankly made the whole escapade worthwhile. The interview did not go well. Firstly driving in Madrid is not a lot of fun, especially after a late night and a long drive. In the end we accepted we were lost, parked, and jumped on the underground to get to where we were meant to be. Or not, as it turned out; we walked in the office to be greeted with "Ah! You've come to the wrong place!" The Director of Studies of the School in question was meant to have sent us an email with details of the interview; she didn't and consequently I had to find the address for the school on the internet (which I sent to her for confirmation) and which turned out to be the other end of town from where the interviews were actually being held. Still we did at least get interviewed - together! Bit strange, seeing as we were technically competing for the same job. Hmmmm.

Funnily enough we've yet to hear anything back from that school. Back to the job pages!

A quarter of the way through...

One week of our month-long teaching course has gone by and Theo has already presided over three lessons, while I've been in charge of two. We've got loads more to learn, but at this stage we don't seem to be doing too badly and I'm convinced my students almost learned something during my last lesson. It was a close-run thing, anyway.

Apart from the general affability of the students, trainees and tutors, I've had two more pleasant realisations this week:
1. I really like teaching. With a couple of provisos. That the subject is English (I don't think quantum theory would do it for me, somehow. You probably need at least GCSE Physics, which would be a bit of a stumbling block in my case) and the students are adults (I'm quite happy to leave the challenge of trying to teach surly teenagers who're more interested in chewing gum or texting their mates to other people, frankly).
2. I like being back in the classroom as a student myself. If you ask me, further and higher education is wasted on the young. I definitely wouldn't have been so enthusiastic if I had done this course fifteen-odd years ago. Now, even the homework is quite satisfying, in the same way as going for a run or doing a work-out in the gym. It's a bit of a slog and you keep wishing it'll be over soon, but when it is you get a definite feeling of achievement and even, dare I say, a touch of euphoria. Or maybe that's just the relief you naturally feel, say, after overcoming a bout of constipation.

In my short time as a trainee teacher, I've also had a couple of insights about the habits of my own schoolteachers. The obsessive break-time cigarette-smoking and coffee-drinking, for example. Theo and I aren't doing the former at all and my consumption of coffee is so far under control (one con-leche and one contado per day - I could stop any time, honest...) but our fellow trainees are puffing away like the regular Strawberry Line service and I'm sure some of them are mainlining caffeine in the bogs. One thing you don't appreciate when you're a pupil or student is how damn terrifying you and your peers can be to the less experienced pedagog. By the time the teachers are too experienced to feel the fear, their addictions are too far gone to even attempt giving them up. Thus, the delightful ash-tray and coffee-breath cocktail of halitosis that let's you know they're reading your answers over your shoulder, even without looking.

Over-flowing bag syndrome is something I've often wondered about, too. Actually, it would be an exaggeration to say often, but since my initiation into the realm of the schoolroom, I've been frequently reminded of the seemingly endless books, papers and pens carted around by my former teachers, even as my own bulging backpack tips out all over the classroom floor.

So, three more weeks to go and major cock-ups notwithstanding, Theo and I will both be certified. It's a heady prospect.

Let loose on unwitting learners

Theo and I have both completed our first twenty minutes of classroom teaching. It doesn't sound like a lot, but when you have a class of expectant faces in front of you (at least I assume that was the expression. I suppose some of them might have had wind or something) and zero experience at the chalk face (it's a white board nowadays, but that doesn't seem to sound as good) it's a tad daunting. However, Theo and I reckon we both did okay - at least, none of our students nor ourselves felt compelled to run out of the room screaming - whether any actual learning took place is a moot point. Mind you, I think we both learned that it is better to appear fairly relaxed, even if you want to run out of the room screaming, so that's something. Perhaps in the next couple of weeks we may actually manage to teach our pupils to speak some English. Although they appeared to be doing a lot of that without too much assistance on our part, luckily.

But in all seriousness, the fact that we have just spent the last week helping Spaniards improve their English (when we weren't dancing, drinking or telling filthy stories to one another) certainly gave our confidence levels a huge head-start. We both quite enjoyed it, too.

Learning to speak English

Kate and I have been accepted on a CELTA Teaching English as a Foreign Language course in Barcelona, starting November 3rd. So for the past week we've been trying to learn how to speak English!

Luckily we're staying with Kate's mother Cathy this week who is (like my Mum actually) a TEFL teacher, so she's been helping us with our pre-course homework. 6 months on the road without having to work have made this a bit of a culture shock, but Cathy has more or less guided us through the 3rd conditional, phrasal verbs and progressive tenses.

Next week we're off to warm up our language skills a bit more, spending a week in a four star hotel (expenses paid) near Salamanca talking English to Spanish learners on a Pueblo Ingles week. Should get us in the mood.

Then a month in Barcelona, lodging with a German translator, working 9 to 5. Culture shock alert! We're quite excited though.