School in London - Classes Begin

Tuesday 30 August 2005 

First day of class. And what a day! It was jammed packed with stuff – or so it seemed to me at any rate and it was a long day as well.

I made it to the Apple store via the Tube and actually got there a bit before ten am so the store had not opened yet – I didn’t have to be at school until nearly noon so I thought this might be a good opportunity to get some online stuff done and indeed it was just that. So I got to the store early and had to stand in line! At an Apple store! Which apparently is pretty much the norm here. Can you believe it? Anyway after the doors opened I went upstairs to the auditorium seating area and plugged into the apple wireless system, checked emails and uploaded the blog stuff and photos and then headed off to school.

Registration was between 11:30 and 11:50 and class started at 12 noon. We met our primary tutor Annie and our secondary tutors Ben and Paulette. (Annie will be doing all the assessments, etc. for all of us during the course of study) Today was our day of becoming acquainted with (1) each other and (2) the program. We spend much of the first couple of hours playing a variety of games to get us to become familiar with each (quickly) and also to appreciate the value of structured activities to accomplish specific aims. Anyway, whatever it was it pretty much a lot of fun and indeed I got to know quite a lot about 14 total strangers, only one of whom was from the US (well OK she was only born there and lives and teaches in Greece). We have students of a variety of ages – although virtually all are quite younger than I am I suspect – and from Switzerland, Romania, Angola, Bahrain, Greece, and of course most were from the UK. But I don’t feel like an odd duck – yet.

There are 15 students altogether and in the afternoon we were broken into our three Teaching Practice Groups of 5 students each: ours consists of Christina who is from Greece/US, Richard, Sophie and Kaye from the UK and of course me. 

The way this works is we have two classes or “input sessions” every morning, Monday through Friday (9-12), and we practice-teach every afternoon beginning tomorrow Wednesday. We then received our teaching assignments: our group will be the same new incoming group of intermediate level students for two weeks after which we will teach a new group of elementary level students for the final two weeks.  Apparently this is the “throw ‘em in the deep end of the pool to teach ‘em to swim” theory of teacher training—but hey we knew that coming on board. 

We spend the remainder of the afternoon working on the administrative stuff one usually gets when one attends school (I suppose) and were given our assignments for our first teaching practice session, schedule for Wednesday (tomorrow) afternoon. This is the only session in which we will be totally unobserved and in which we will not have produce a lesson plan – most of the materials indeed everything we need really is provided for us, it’s only a matter of putting our heads together as a team to hammer some of the details out. It is also the only session when we will all 5 teach the same day. After Wednesday each teaching practice will consist of three 40-minute sessions, each taught by one member of the group. My first observed, planned session will be Thursday. Can’t wait!