January 7, 2010

SOMETHING BIT ME. I presume it was in the night. I just started to itch/hurt near the end of our first lesson of the day. I was NOT a happy camper.

Rik asked me again about whether or not I understand how to lock the door. Well, yes, but I’m not sure I WANT to lock myself in a tiny room! To him, I think once it’s locked it’s closed, but to me, it’s LOCKED.

We learned about using grammar in a more practical in a lesson- to make it accessible. Then we had our second Czech lesson. This time we learned about how to order something at a deli. I don’t feel like I get it right when we learn it, but I felt quite confident when we reviewed the previous lesson.

Then we had lunch. We went to a new café and had… yep, sandwiches.

After lunch, there was time to practice and prepare for our first lesson. Dalia was driving my nuts. She was asking me a billion questions. I wanted to shake her and say, “it’s easy!! We just follow the lesson plan!” For some reason, she was determined not to use the warm-up in the plan so we dropped it. We also talked to Erwin and decided to drop our grammar in favor of just doing the new lexis (vocab AND vocab phrases). Our lesson was about making a complaint, using present continuous and present simple.

Our class started off well, in spite of the fact that we only had one student named Yolanda. Steph and Charlie sat in as students. We followed our plan for the most part and got straight through the lesson doing our various activities. Then we found out we still had almost 20 minutes. HA! We improvised different versions of the same stuff we’d already done. The class felt like it had been a car wreck by the time we’d finished.

Then Charlie and Steph had their lesson and we critiqued both lessons. I was surprised that our teacher, Geoff, didn’t have more negative things to say about our lesson. Clearly, we’d messed up the timing but he complimented how we improvised, corrected mistakes, used concept check questions and got the students involved. Overall, coming out of it, I was rather pleased. Apparently, it wasn’t as bad as it had seemed.

After class, Steph, Mikaela and I went to dinner. We accidentally walked all of the way to the main intersection where I live so I directed us over one more street to where I’d seen some cafes. We went to Café Te. They had lots of sort of familiar options. I had spinach tortellini and the house wine. We all shared chocolate cake and banafee (banana and toffee) pudding. Steph was convinced banafee was American and was surprised when we balked. I decided to go to Starbucks in the morning before class as opposed to that night. It was already 9:30 and I was exhausted!