April 23, 2012

Despite my jittery state, I forced myself to sleep until the alarm went off. Walking into the kitchen, I then noticed that it was pouring cats and dogs outside and immediately thought of how I was going to carry all my materials, fly swatters and umbrella under such deluge. The good thing about the rain is that it makes every single leaf glisten, especially now that they are that light green color of newly budded trees. I got to the UNESCO Building exactly at 8:00 and although the door was open, there was no one there from Multikid yet. Corrie showed up a few minutes after I did and we set out to sort through the handouts and stationery items the participants were to have at their desks. Contrary to the ETM in January when stationery items were neatly arranged on the tables and handouts sorted according to the schedule of presentations, we got everything dumped into different boxes and the handouts had not been separated or even punch-holed so that the participants could just add them to their binders.

I was surprised to see Sandy and Tahmina walk in just as we were about to start our warm up. They brought in copies of the Forum magazines for the participants and Sandy gave a little speech about the importance of the ETM to send forth English teachers that could disseminate the new methods we were about show them. I presented my “What’s in a Name” introductory game and Sandy commented it had been interesting learning about the origins or meanings of their names. Thankfully, they left right after that.

I did my presentation on the importance of mentoring new teachers and gave them a few case scenarios a new teacher could face and asked to come up with a solution in their groups. This might have been a new approach for them and I don’t believe they understood they needed to advise the new teacher on ways to handle the problem as they all said things such as: “This is what I do…”. Corrie continued with speaking activities and then we went to lunch at the F1 Café.

It was my turn again with “Strategies for Teaching Vocabulary” and the PowerPoint presentation kept faltering despite Aziza’s best efforts. I decided to scrap that and just show them different ways to present vocabulary in an interactive way offering some of the Snickers bars I had as prizes. One hour time slot is too short a period to talk about the need to teach vocabulary more intensively than grammar and then show innovative ways of doing it. At least, they had fun with the games. Corrie followed me with easy writing activities using pictures and writing prompts. Before we knew it, the first day was over. I promised the participants to do a group mailing and send them all the handouts I had created as the ones provided by Multikid were of very poor quality and were not even in the proper order.

We didn’t receive the daily evaluation the participants were supposed to complete so we could have feedback. Aziza said she didn’t know anything about it. We improvised by asking them to jot down a few lines as to what they liked and what they didn’t like or couldn’t understand as Aziza mentioned that some of them were having trouble following our presentations because we spoke too fast and they, of course, spoke “British” and not American English.

I picked up what I hope is my last batch of laminated materials and bought some flat bread along the way to have it for dinner. I had no energy to go grocery shopping. So, it’s one down and two more to go.