Almost finished

We only have two more days of the CELTA and then we’re officially qualified English teachers. Unfortunately, as I was ill last week and missed one of my teaching practices, I have to teach both Monday and Tuesday this week, so I’ve concentrated a lot of stress at the end of the course. Oh well…
I had a bit of a throat infection and felt feverish early in the week, which as you can imagine was a bit of a disaster…I went to the tourist hospital (it’s so great, free/cheap healthcare with your non-Italian passport) and had a great experience with a doctor who spoke no English…luckily ‘tonsil’ is very similar in Italian, as is ‘antibiotic’. I also made a bit of a scene on Tuesday when I was supposed to be teaching, but ended up in floods of tears in front of everybody. Still, I feel pretty much recovered now, touch wood.
So, things that have been happening. Last weekend was great – we went out with some of our students for the first time, which meant we had authentic Italians to take us to nice cheap non-touristy places.
We had the best pizza ever at a place in San Lorenzo, where the wine was €5/litre. I also found out that after a few drinks I can speak some great Italian. I think my students were very impressed.

Romans chilling out in San Lorenzo - I love it, note the guy with the trumpet

I also finally gave into the Italian obsession with bags and bought a new handbag. NOT a rip-off designer one, I should add. The weekend was also devoted to plenty of lesson planning, as we had to switch around and teach a different level of student – my group started with the upper-intermediates who can really speak a lot of English, and then had to move to a class of almost total beginners, which was a huge shock to the system. I still don’t feel completely ok with it. It’s a lot harder to stick to the CELTA principles of teaching only in English with this group.
This week has been a nightmare in many ways with illness, teaching practice, several deadlines and lots of late nights studying – this course was so intensive, and I’m just so glad it’s nearly over. However, I was nicely distracted from the work on Thursday night when my housemates and I discovered that, due to the festival of Corpus Christi, the pope was processing past our street on his way from San Giovanni church to Santa Maria Maggiore. We rushed out at about 8pm and were greeted with an amazing spectacle – the streets were lined with onlookers and there were just so many people. Hordes of monks, nuns, boy and girlscouts, novices, priests, archbishops and cardinals marched by while someone or other read a sermon over a loudspeaker, and then the pope-mobile approached. Fantastic, and the pope looks just the same in real life! That was quite a thrill.


The pope!! see how he's glowing

The Popemobile can go pretty fast as you can see by this speed blur

Quote of the night:
Me - Wow, the pope!! How come he's not waving like the Queen?
Housemate Ian - Mary, he's praying. He has his mind on the corpus cristi.

Countries I've been to

create your own visited country map
or check our Venice travel guide

I think it's a bit pathetic!

Teaching-tastic

My fellow teacher trainees one lunch break...We took this photo because we decided we looked like the School of Athens!! ooh, we're so pretentious.

(This piazza is, incidentally, called Piazza Dante. I get alot of grief about Dante here because on our first day, we played a 'getting to know you' game where the teacher trainer had picked one fact about each of us from our application forms, and we had to find out which fact fitted which person. For me she put 'Knows alot about Dante'...ooh the shame!! I try to play up to it by referencing Dante at every possible opportunity.)

So I've completed my first full week of CELTA!! it's Saturday morning here, lovely and sunny, and I'm in the study centre, ostensibly researching language learning approaches for dyslexic people, but really spending my time uploading photos. Some things don't change.

I'm still really enjoying the teaching, but we've also had the chance for some nights out, particularly last friday which was rather spectacular, encompassing most of Rome: Campo di Fiori in the Centro Storico, Trastevere, and Testaccio (the bit where all the clubs are...it's very well organised here!) and most delightfully, a club called 'BumBum':





It was somewhat depressing coming back to school on Monday after such a glorious 4-day weekend of fun and sun, but the course is so busy and we're working with such a fun group of people that you don't have time to feel bored and discontented. The TEFL techniques are all about engaging students, pairwork, speaking, games etc, so it can be quite a laugh. The 9 of us trainees all get on really well, and our lessons can be hilarious - we spend alot of time testing out techniques together, and the grammar work especially does not tend to be as easy as you might expect for native speakers! most of the intermediate students can name tenses quicker than we can.

I seem to accidentally specialise in teaching ridiculous random words to my students - so far we've had 'vaulting horse' (called a 'pommelhorse' in the US I understand), 'stag-do' and 'hen-night'. Oh yes, I'm preparing these guys for the real world alright. On Thursday I had a lesson on double-meanings and attempted to explain the joke
'When is a door not a door?
When it's ajar.'

The other trainees were in hysterics at the back as I explained first 'ajar' and then 'a jar' (they keep NOT knowing words I assume they will know, even though they have alot of unexpected vocabulary - the other day a guy asked about the word 'Thug', pronouncing it in a hilarious Italian accent like 'tooog', and then asked 'Is it like rogue?' ha, nice Dickensian vocab).

One guy in our group, Antonio, is an actor and does great lessons with the students - lots of jumping around and role plays and so on, which is great to watch. We have approximately 10 students, most of them about my age, although there are some older ones as well. As the course only costs them 100 Euros, they don't tend to take it too seriously and skip lessons/show up late all the time, which is a nightmare for a new teacher trying to plan. We're currently taking the upper-intermediate students who have a really good knowledge of English, so we can have quite in-depth discussions and so on, but next week we'll have to swap to the beginner group which is composed of alot of Sudanese asylum seekers who speak almost no english - very different challenge!

For one of our assignments we have to do a study of a particular student's learning style, and in a nice professional and mature way, I have developed a crush on my student, an Italian called Iacopo - he's so cute. He's hoping to go to London College of Communication next year to take an MA in Photography, and I've been helping him to email the college and find out if his qualifications are eligible. The other trainees keep finding me talking to him in the corridors and asking 'How many interviews does the boy need?!?' He's great at English but he's also dyslexic and finds it hard to study grammar and break down words or sentences, which is really good for my essay! lots to write about.

I've been trying to crack on with the job-hunting and actually had an interview at a language school on thursday evening. It felt like a bit of a farce to me as I'm not even qualified yet, but apparently there is a shortage of teachers and they might consider me even with NO experience. Unfortunately they gave me a grammar test, one of the questions being 'explain the difference between 'who' and 'that'' which I literally didn't have a clue about (apparently it's something to do with clauses) so I may have crashed and burned. Anyway, I'll crack on as I'm determined to stay in Italy - I love it here. (But I do miss you all very much...thanks for texting me everybody who has, I apologise if you have huge phone bills...I dread to think what mine will be like! I'll look into getting an Italian sim card soon).


I love this statue



Just something bizarre that I walked past last sunday!!

First week of CELTA course completed...

Well, sort of. As the Italians take May 1st as a bank holiday, and school is closed again today, I've actually only done 3 days of college. Still, it felt like a full week. This course is going to be way hard work, just like I've been warned (approximately one million times). Harder than my degree, though? I'm not so sure.
The course is good and I think I'm going to really like teaching, although it's totally nerve wracking...we went into college on monday and were told we'd be taking a class the following day, with just 24 hours warning...still, I think it's probably good that they drop us in at the deep end like that - no time to get worked up. I've taken 2 classes now - there are 5 of us trainee teachers taking an upper-intermediate english class of about 8 students - great teacher/student ratio!! Standing up in front of them is a bit terrifying, since every lesson we take is assessed and there's a trainer sitting at the back taking notes the whole time, but it's fun and the standard of english is actually quite good, so we can do interesting things.

My housemates in our hallway - we don't have a living room so we're trying to improvise
I'm living in a flat with 2 guys, one from Canada and one from Bristol. They're cool and we get on well.

There's another girl and a guy in a college flat just down the road, so we've been hanging out quite alot.

Yesterday there was a fantastic, free, open-air concert in the piazza outside San Giovanni church, which is just one block away from our apartment, so we went down there at about 4pm.

It was great - all the italian youth really letting their hair down, great (italian) bands, singing, dancing, lots of beer drinking, climbing up lampposts, etc. (One of our students, an older Italian lady, had told us it was 'like Woodstock'...weren't too disappointed!)And all in a historic square with a huge, ornate church overlooking the whole event. Surreal.