TEFL
Judi & I just completed four intensive weeks of study to get a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate. We, along with five young ladies from the U.S., Italy, England and Ireland, studied for four weeks in a quaint little building in the heart of the Albaycín, the old Muslim quarter of Granada.
The English grammar required by TEFL, as we learned, is nothing like the English we learned in high school and college some 35 years ago! To learn to teach it to students whose mother tongue is not English requires learning lots of new things. It was an intensive time (to say it mildly!) both of study and of putting into practice what we were learning.
Alastair, originally from England was one of our trainers,
Along with Monika, from Poland.
Vince and Roberta, also from England, are the directors of the school.
Over the four weeks we taught eight classes, two each to students of beginning, elementary, pre-intermediate and intermediate levels. These classes were supervised by our trainers and dissected thoroughly, with feedback given in the evaluation session the day following each class.
This picture sums up our experience as TEFL students: a number of tools to put in our ‘tool bag’ as we, with some trepidation, venture out into the world of teaching English.
Graduation day brought with it an express package straight from Italy with the diplomas!
One of the blessings of the course was enlarging our circle of friends.
Deanna is from California,
Nancy is from Sicily, but is presently teaching English in Granada. We discovered she’s also our neighbor!
Then, of course, the director, Vince, along with the trainers, Alastair and Monika,
To whom we gave, as a class, a set of permanent markers with a bag to hold them. They seemed to always be losing their markers! You could say we wanted to leave our 'mark' on them!
The experience was intense and stretched us almost to the limit at times, but we survived. Now to figure out what to do with it!