Looking back on the weekend and today…

Ultimate Frisbee on Friday afternoon was fun. Beautiful and warm in the afternoon, so it was good to be out in the sun and running around. I’m out of shape, but all the walking I’ve been doing has helped to strengthen my legs, at least. I don’t think I was any more out of shape than anyone else who was playing, so that’s not too bad!

Started my teaching class on Saturday. We were in class for about 6 hours, I guess. It’ll be a lot to learn very quickly.

Sat. night, the Presbyterian volunteers who my flatmate has introduced me to were having a big dinner party for St. Patrick’s Day. We were each asked to bring a dish and it had to be green! Darren and I pulled the bachelor trick. I bought canned peas (imported from the U.S.) and put them in the microwave when I got to the party (but they were quite good) and Darren brought 2 big plastic bottles of Mt. Dew. But that’s b/c those having the party asked him to bring a beverage.

It was fun. Lots of good conversation and relaxing. After dinner, they got out a guitar and a few people played songs. Mostly praise/worship songs but also a good version of “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor. *laugh* It was sung in a French accent by a guy from Chile and a few of us on back-up vocals. This is the world I am living in right now. Weird stuff.

Class today was good, but long. We spent some time on methods and most of the afternoon observing one of our teachers in a class.

My first Teaching Practice is on Monday afternoon, so I need to put together some notes. It's pretty weird b/c 5 of us from my course will all be teaching the same class of students. But not at the same time -- one after the other. The first person has 25 minutes to do part of the lesson, then the next person to do more for 25 minutes, etc. I'm the last person, so hopefully we're not too far behind by that point.

We talked over it all a bit with one of our instructors this afternoon at the end of class, I'll prep some tonight, then we're getting together for 45 minutes before class tomorrow. It's our first day of teaching, so it's just to get a taste. A bit daunting, though!! All we've been doing the past 2 days is learning through observing other teachers and not getting a whole lot of formal methodology. So we'll see...

Grammar kicking my butt, I was talking all the technical names and explanations for things. Sure, I'm a native speaker but that means that I do a lot of things naturally and just learned them along the way. Once you start talking about the perfect tense of verbs, why things are continuous, and all that I get a bit lost. It's all very important when learning English as a second language but if I ever learned it at all, it was in middle school, so that's been awhile! Some of it reminds me of trying to learn the grammar for Spanish (and now for Arabic), but English is unique in many ways.

These next couple of weeks are going to be pretty hectic, so I probably won’t be emailing or doing journal entries as often as I have been lately.