Celta Teaching Practice #4

Is done!  And with a pass, but just barely.  Anyway, 4 down, and 4 more to go.  It's hard not to become a little jaded.  My lesson on prepositions of place was quite fabulous I think, at least that was the feedback from the other trainees.  And the students seemed to love it and get a lot out of it.  After the break, they were still talking about it, and asking me questions and discussing amongst themselves the finer details.  The feedback I got from the trainer was nit-picky crap like:

1. You shouldn't use the recycled paper, use nice white paper for handouts.  My uni uses the recycled paper for lots of stuff and it's kind of the only machine we're allowed to use for more than a very small numbers of copies.  I was copying stuff for my uni classes, so I just did it all at the same time.

2. It was too teacher-centered.  I did do a little talking about stuff for about 5 minutes out of the 40 minute lesson.  Things like, "between" has 3 items, "next to" has 2, and "across from" must have something after it.  I think actually I could have been on a training video or something for what a student-centered lesson on prepositions of place should look like.

3. An information gap activity was "controlled-practice" and not "freer-practice."  I totally disagreed.  The students were asking and giving directions, but they were able to use any of the vocab we talked about (or any other stuff they knew) to describe where the place was to their partner.  To me, this is about as freer practice as prepositions of place can get. 

4. Using "across from" instead of "opposite."  I'm Canadian, not British, so how can I teach the British way?  And most students in Korea want to learn "American-English" anyway.

Ridiculous.  I have no more to say and am moving on.  I can't wait to be done.