CELTA graduates to go through 24 teaching hour ordeal
Taking inspiration from the Mars500 simulated Mars mission, Cambridge ESOL has finally found a solution to the disconnect between the 6 hours of teaching in 4 weeks of the CELTA and real working life. All CELTA graduates will be locked in a mock Oxford Street language school in Siberia and put through a full but fake teaching schedule safe in the knowledge that real students will not have to suffer and that a doctor and psychologist will be on hand for the usual mental collapses, tears, insomnia, etc.
In order to make the week realistic, the actors in the roles of staff and students have been trained to reproduce typical situations such as:
- photocopiers breaking down
- DoSs that are too busy to speak to anyone
- staff ignoring the inexperienced newbie because they are pissed off about falling standards
- having to cover lessons for the students’ favourite teacher
- being put in with complete beginners because the management know they don’t know how to complain in English yet
- finding that you’ve made an enemy for life by taking their mug or chair
- being hit on by the scary teacher in the corner who only grunts at everyone else
- finding that the person you’ve been taking advice from has been there for 2 days and before that was a double glazing salesman
- being asked to explain the 3rd conditional to Elementary students
- missing answer keys
- a queue forming outside the DoS’s office door straight after your first lesson
Any more suggestions for ways to make it realistic?
Tags: Humour
June 4th, 2010 at 5:21 am
LOL. Great stuff Alex, I think you’ve covered the main ones there. Maybe something to do with parents too? Like parents of your worst student coming to complain that you aren’t patient enough or something like that?
Gotta be something more with coursebooks there. E.g. you’re given the elementary class and the intermediate coursebook. Or you have the intermediate class, the intermediate student’s book and the upper intermediate teacher’s book and you don’t notice until half-way through the lesson.
Sign me up as one of the trainers for this programme!
June 4th, 2010 at 6:49 am
LOL I’m off to work still smiling! Think you’ve got most of them….
Leahn
June 4th, 2010 at 7:32 am
… being asked to tailor-make a suitable one-to-one course on “English for supply chain management in the Mongolian automotive industry”, for that important corporate client (CEF level A1-A2).
June 4th, 2010 at 8:11 am
Fabulous!
Can I add some other nice stuff too?
- Being told that all the rubbish you learnt on that course you’ve just finished doesn’t work. Explain the rules, translate the text and get the students to read aloud is all you can do.
- Being asked to train all the other teachers who haven’t got a CELTA
- Having your DOs observe you while teaching and stopping you and taking over the lesson because they think you are doing something wrong
- Finding out that there is no photocopier and if you want to use photocopies, you have to pay for them out of your own pocket
- The one single overhead projector in the school is always in use by one of the senior teachers
- You are asked to teach a complete beginner non-literate multilingual group of adults who have no left to right reading or writing experience
- You are given all the pre-school classes and very young classes because you are at the bottom of the seniority list
- You are expected to take home 32 homework notebooks from each class for marking; correcting exercises in class is not allowed but you are not paid for this extra marking time
- All the other teachers hate you on arrival because none of them have ever followed a CELTA or any other training course and now you are going to make them look pretty bad; of course they undermine everything you do and are happy to report student complaints “he doesn’t know the rules’, ‘he doesn’t correct all the mistakes’ etc.
I’ll stop here – I could go on forever.
June 4th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
Great stuff. You’ve all inspired me to come up with some more:
- Being slagged off for confusing New Headway, Headway Second Edition, American Headway Second Edition and New Headway Second Edition American Edition
- Finding that every single game you were taught on your CELTA was used by the last teacher]
- Told “You know that Task Based Learning/ CLIL/ ESP approach you heard briefly mentioned in the last week of the course. Well, that’s how all classes have to be taught here”
- Being given all advise and instructions in acronyms you don’t know, e.g. “Please continue with PGWE2 (you’ll find a copy in the SAC in the PInt section), then finish the lesson off with some practice of PPs”
- Being told “You said you had one Japanese student in your CELTA teaching practice groups, right? Great, because we’ve got 50 Japanese top executives arriving tomorrow. They have to improve quickly, but don’t like being embarrassed by difficult materials. Oh, and make sure not to offend them with cultural boos boos. Here’s a copy of Headstart and an Economist from two months ago. Off you trot…”
June 4th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
You find oout that
- the accommodation which the school is offering is either a shack or a shed in the back of a rather unkempt and dirty yard
- your boss lives in a house with a swimming pool and has a maid and a cook but when you ask for copies or to be paid for marking, they burst into tears and explain their financial difficulties to you in very great detail
- the homework you marked/corrected the day before, was shown to your boss who corrected your corrections (often wrongly) and gave the student a better grade
- you have to use five or six books, activity books, supplementary listening, etc… for which you do not have enough hours in any week but if you skip one exercise, you get told off by…well, basically everyone, even your students
- your salary is not high enough to buy really smart clothes but your boss expects you to look like they do in their Arm…i gear
More?
June 4th, 2010 at 9:38 pm
… but not to worry. On the third day, a sudden drop in student numbers means the school decides to combine a few classes, leaving you without anyone to teach. Which means that you can get down to the serious, and potentially more lucrative business, of looking for some private students.
June 5th, 2010 at 4:54 am
Gosh, this is making me feel kinda nostalgic. Could we add
- teaching most of the course book in your first lesson and then discovering you were meant to make the material last for a term
- being invited to the beach by the official at the government office who you deperately need to issue your work papers, but suspecting that he has more in mind than just a trip to the beach
- being told to write and administer an end of course exam when you’re still trying to get your head around what you’re teaching yourself
- finding your colleagues are about to go on strike because they haven’t been paid
May 30th, 2011 at 2:54 pm
Brilliant. I needed a laugh.