The two-headed dog of the Lochend Pond is taking you back home to where I came from.

In random order (i.e.: the order in which blogger spits out the code which is always jumbled)

Sophie

Silvia and Alex

Sarah

Paul

Tom

Neil

Jana

Gianna

David

Natasha

That’s it. The course has finished, all twelve trainees have passed the course and will, if Cambridge doesn’t object upon inspection of our portfolios, be awarded the CELTA certificate. Here are some final pictures.

The trainee bunch, from left to right: Neil (Aberdeen, Scotland, and Barcelona, Spain, as of Tuesday, c’rect?), me, Natasha (Rostov, Russia, one of our birthday girls on the course; she must already be back on her way home by now, bye, Natasha), Philip or flippant Phil, Phil who’s got ants in his pants, our endearing tutor (currently London, England), Sophie (North Berwick, Scotland, who taught kids in Thailand for a year before she began to study though she’s only 21), Paul (Edinburgh, Scotland, who is also heading to Spain soon, good luck for both you future Spaniards), Tom (currently based somewhere 1.5 hours away from Edinburgh, but has recently returned from seven year ’stint’ in Japan, wow ), Sarah (currently Edinburgh, Scotland, but she’s been about everywhere doing everything, including being a chef in Zambia), Alex (from England, based in Edinburgh, another birthday and the brave person who went on the deep fried mars bar excursion with me, thank you Alex!) and Silvia (originally from Sao Paulo in Brasil, but now based in the North of Scotland, a natural as a language teacher AND a former olympic athlete, whew).

Missing in this picture: Steve (Mr. Capoeira who had a fifteen pages lesson plan for his final TP and does not want to have his picture published on a blog), Gianna (who I’d like to dub Goldilocks and who I sadly missed on this last gettogether), and David (who will by now be on his way to Rome, his new home, best of luck!), and Mark, our other incredibily efficient tutor.

Some of our students:

The tall guy in the middle is Pavel, “my” case study. I wrote my second assignment about his language skills and needs, and he wrote on essay for me about the impact of open source software on the IT market. While he’s still at intermediate stage (and has come to Scotland from Russia about 2 months ago), he is (to my and other people’s judgment) incredibly smart and able to make witty jokes in English. And he’s two meters tall, although he’s only 17, as you can probably see in this picture. The guy next to him is Omar from Senegal,an aspiring engineer, and also another rough diamond on the course. Props, guys! The one on the left I don’t know, must be an arb stranger or somebody who joined the intermediate group after I had changed to elementary.

The two guys on the left are Faustino (and if everybody in Galicia is like Tino, like Tino said, then I don’t think I want to go to Galicia, certainly not without hearing protection) and Adam, originally from Poland, who is a triathlete, wow. To the right: Sophie and Natasha.

And a few pics to document the feast…

Tapping into the mother lode of Scottish delights…

…pretending not to see me, but actually lying in ambush to get a piece of my marmite sandwich…

…and another shot of Edinburgh castle, overseeing the garden with all its countless luncheoners, me being one of them, for one of the very last times in probably a long time.

Dear World,

You won’t believe how happy I am to be able to say that my FINAL teaching practice unit is coming up tomorrow. Last TP was tough, Philip (Dale, our tutor) meant to be “pushing me a bit harder” to work on my “missing link”, pronunciation drill. Am unable to say right now whether I’ll be able to meet the demands and to outperform all my previous TPs (not even sure whether this is what I want), but at least I can say that I am well prepared.

Am a bit worried about my fellow trainee Steven whose final TP covers a language point, and for an unknown reason this has never appeared on his lesson plan up to this point. Needless to say that this is unfair, as the expectation generally is that your last TP is to be your masterpiece. EDIT: I was actually wrong in assuming that this was Steve’s first language point. As a matter of fact, it was his third. S’pose the reason for this is that Steve managed to make all his language lessons appear like a skills lesson to me – must be his innate gift to establish rapport with complete strangers. He’s been known as “Mr Instant Rapport” in all the intermediate lessons – the very low proficiency level of the elementary group might have scared him a bit. Dunno, am thinking about what I could do to help him through the final TP – timewise this is going to be tough as Stefanie is coming up to EDI tomorrow (yay!).

Ok, nuf said for today. Some pics from the bee hive:

Today is Sunday. Tomorrow the final week of my four weeks teacher training course is to begin. Right now, I am busy writing my fourth assignment. Looking at our time table, I wonder how we actually managed to crank out four assignmengts in between morning sessions, teaching practice and feedback sessions in the afternoon and lesson planning in the evenings. Well, actually, I know how: Through sacrificing our weekends, sacrificing sleep and being incredibly disciplined when it cam eto meeting deadlines.

The principal said last week that week three would be the toughest. I strongly disagree. Week three was a piece of cake in comparison to this final week where everything has begun to hurt. You’re fed up with assignments, fed up with rushing to the study centre at a quarter past eight to get your lesson material and/or assignments printed, fed up with struggling with the photo copy machine, fed up with the smell of the trainee room, fed up with eating sandwiches, … FED UP describes my attitude toward anything related to the course right now.

Of course I have learned a lot. Professionally, this has been the most rewarding experience ever, and there is a ginormous amount of things I am intending to change about my teaching. Personally, it was very rewarding, getting to know the other trainees which seem to come from all walks of life, but yet there seem to be a few common traits which bring them together, the two most important being a) extended experience with living abroad b) having studied unmarketable disciplines, in particular philosophy and literature. Isn’t it a weird concidence that three out of only 12 people have been to Zambia, for instance? How often do you meet people who would even vaguely know where to put Zambia on the map?

Etc. pp. Need to turn to my assignment again. In the meantime, for those who are considering joining the world of ELT and CELTA, have a look at the English droid page. This might ward you off eventually, ’cause there is a grain of truth in everything s/he says…

Begin here, if you don’t know how to make sense of the navigation:
CELTA without tears

N.B.: CELTA is the course I am currently taking: Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults, monitored by Cambridge university. And the Cambridge assessor is going to come to OBSERVE us tomorrow. There was a 50% chance that I wouldn’t be teaching tomorrow, but of course: I’ve drawn the shorter straw.

Remember Trainspotting? Remember the worst toilet in Scotland? Well, what you haven’t seen yet is:

The Evilest Toilet in Scotland

Believe me, it’s not haunted, and that has nothing to do with the Turkish Eye on the wall. Ghosts would leave this place with burning corneas if they ever stumbled into it, and humans would do the same if not mother nature forced them to stay a little while. Towel or bin? Who needs it…

Ok, I haven’t actually found out yet whether the youtube embed object tags works or not because it takes a whiles for their content supervisers to give their green light. I’ll upload it anyway and check whether its up tomorrow morning.

G’night folks! And who ever called me today from a +4179xxx number – please text me! I won’t answer calles while I am here! First reason: costs. Second reason: I don’t accept calls from unknown numbers after office hours cause they smell like work – and I spent all my office hours from 08:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at Basil Paterson. You called at 6:20 p.m.! +41, ist that Switzerland or the Netherlands?