Finally, I’m essentially done with the CELTA! I had my last practice teaching session, and have turned in my last assignment, so all I have to do now is show up. I would have liked to have finished my last teaching with an “S+,” but I made two serious mistakes. It all come down to the obvious fact that elementary-level students don’t understand much of what you tell them. You have to demonstrate everything, because they can’t follow explanations or directions.

That fundamental problem manifested itself into two mistakes in my lesson plan. My execution was fine, but my plan was flawed. The grammar point was the present perfect used to talk about the past (“I’ve written a few letters), which is one of the most difficult things for non-native speakers to understand (to quote Nut from the intermediate class: “I don’t like perfect tenses.”). I wanted to teach from context, so I used a picture of fried grasshoppers and explained that I’ve never eaten fried grasshoppers. The problem was that I was explaining, so the students never really understood that I was talking about the past.

Then I had two controlled exercise that went really well. I laid out exactly what they had to say, so they all knew what to do. The problem was with the freer exercise, where they were supposed to practice the target language on their own. I wanted them to pretend they were gangs of criminals, and talk about what they have done (present perfect) to cause the police to want them. It was way too much for them, and I couldn’t even get across the fact that I wanted them to come up with a name for their gang. When they finally got talking, one group talked about what they planned to do (future), and the other talked about what they did (past simple), so they didn’t even use the target language. Interestingly, Kwan, the strongest student in the class, talked about how her gang wanted to kill George Bush.

I’m a little disappointed, because I feel as if I would have shown the tutor my plan yesterday, she would have pointed these problems out, and I could have fixed them. Oh well, I’m done.

The guy who just doesn’t get it is still clueless. His last two lessons were assessed as “N,” not to standard. So he is actually in serious jeopardy of not passing the course. We switched tutors, and this one is really strict. Our previous tutor gave people a lot of leeway to do their own things, as long as they kept to the spirit of the CELTA procedures. He even let this guy try to justify his strange lessons. But the new tutor just said to him “no, that’s wrong, you have to do it this way.” He finally accepted the fact that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, so the experienced teacher in our group has made it a group effort to help him out, basically by doing his lesson plan for him. Part, or perhaps all, of his problem is that his breath reeks of alcohol. I would think that since he shelled out so much money for this course, he could at least keep the drinking to the nighttime. But even that is too much for the CELTA. I would recommend only drinking on the weekends during the course. In fact, I ended up only drinking once (with the TESOL gang). Yes, it was a difficult sacrifice.