One Week On
Greg Malivuk
Assuming you don't read the rest of this, I'll just say that I'm done
with the first week of the CELTA course, and it's going quite well.
I've met some wonderful people (including both other teacher trainees
and some of the students in the free English classes we're essentially
practicing our teaching on).
If you notice any odd turns of phrase in the following, it's because I
find myself thinking largely in British English. When I talk my
accent is still American, probably because my mouth doesn't actually
have any practice with other accents, but because a lot of my thinking
seems to be in a different dialect, some bits of wording sneak through
that wouldn't be especially common in American English.
The class is a fairly interesting mix of people, some of whom make me
feel that despite all my traveling in the past year, I've hardly left
my home state. Because it's perhaps more interesting to you than
rambling on for another couple paragraphs about the past week, I'll
just list them briefly:
* There's Hunter from the US, who was two weeks into the CELTA course
at the International House in Beiruit when all the tutors left (on
account of the bombing). So the six trainees still there decided they
should probably head out as well. It's he that would lend a bit of
cruel (but nonetheless kind of darkly humorous) irony if we had to
evacuate here because of a hurricane, this being the season for such
things.
* There's Larah from the UK, who's a primary (elementary) school
teacher back home and is getting this certificate initially so she can
teach English to the immigrant parents of many of the kids at her
school. She told me that the British impression is that most
Americans are rather dim. I told her it's not so much that we
actually are dimmer than the rest of the world, we just for some
reason seem to think being uninformed is a virtue, which from the
outside amounts to pretty much the same thing.
* There's Neil with dual US/UK citizenship (born in the UK), who
currently owns a coffeeshop (http://www.cafe-a-go-go.com/) in Ohio.
* The last trainee at the Student Residence is Garrett, who's my age
and from Texas (I think he graduated from Texas A&M the same time I
finished at UMich).
The other four are staying elsewhere.
* Dan (from London) has just been traveling throughout much of Central
America, and is now stopping here for a month for this course while
his girlfriend takes a Spanish course in Oaxaca (which is a state or
two to the west of here). He's staying with a host family that seems
to be in it for the money, as they basically run it as a lodging house
rather than a family stay.
* Emma (from Scotland) was living in Queenstown, New Zealand for
awhile before coming here. She's also done a fair bit of traveling in
Latin America, and expects to end up teaching somewhere there despite
her mom's wanting her to teach English to immigrants back home. She's
also doing a homestay, which seems a bit more personable than Dan's.
* Teri, though she went to university in Arizona and spent some time
living and working in South Africa with an NGO, is actually from
Rockford, MI, of all places. She graduated from the high school there
in 1999, and doesn't know my friend Melissa (who went to the same
school but graduated two years later). After teaching English for
awhile somewhere, she would like to go to law school and eventually
work in international human rights law. Deciding to do this course
was a bit last-minute for her, so the residence I'm in was full and
she got to stay in a really nice apartment right above the school for
the same (cheap) price I'm paying to stay here in a room from which I
can't really see any sky.
* Finally, there is Sharon, a retired journalist from Texas. She's
here staying with her husband in a condo, and is looking to do English
teaching as a way to keep busy in her retirement.
While I don't expect to have more than one full free day either of the
next two weekends, the workload hasn't gotten to be very much yet, so
most of us are getting together for drinks tonight and then spending
much of tomorrow sitting on the beach. Many of the people who didn't
arrive until a few days before the course started haven't spent any
time on Playa's playa, and some hadn't even seen the water until the
second or third day of the course.
If you've read this far, you deserve a postcard, so email me your
addresses and I'll send you one.
-greg
--
Read about my travels at http://groups.google.com/group/gmalivuktravel.
To see pictures, go to http://mail.google.com and login as
"gmalivuktravel.pics" with password "newzealand".
(Just sending them there as email attachments will be about the
easiest way for me to do it.)