FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL OH MY!

Hi everyone,

Well the first day of school came at last.  We got up early and arrived at the school at 8:30 am.  

Had coffee and then met our main tutor (teacher in Spain) Liz.  We'll have a total of 3 tutors...Liz, Maeve, and David.

Our class has 18 people in it.  David the tutor and Gary are the oldest, I'm the second oldest, and a student named Carlos is about my age--possibly younger.  The rest range in age from 38ish to 24 or so.  Everyone is super great.  My partner for most of the class was Sam.  He's young enough to be my son and we hit it off.  Gary was paired with two young guys--one from Belfast (Sam) and another from Italy (Nick).  They are probably in their mid-ish 20s.  

Liz is a ball of fire.  Just took up learning the dance style called the Lindy Hop and is warm and fun.  She took us through multiple exercises on introducing start up activities to a non-speaking group.  Then Maeve came in and taught an entire lesson using the Gaelic language--never uttered a word of English.  The lesson was how to say hello, my name, some vocabulary, and responses of "I like....x" and "I don't like x."  The purpose of this exercise was to show us what it feels like to be a non-English speaking student in a basic English course.  It was crazy and amazing.  What made it even crazier was that when she introduced us to the written form of the words (Gaelic) that we were speaking--the written form did not resemble what we were saying.  Gaelic is an extremely difficult language.  Maeve was with us for about and hour the whole time I felt slow and challenged.

Then Liz returned to the room and debriefed Maeve's lesson.

Next we met David.  Ah....let's just say that David is cool, direct and a bit stern.  He warmed up about one degree by the time his lesson was done.  He went straight to the board and launched into a lesson on "past simple" and "past progressive" verbs.  My head started spinning!  

He then reviewed about an hour of video showing an exemplary teacher engaged with a class.  The teacher was teaching verb tenses.

The day ended on a high note and off we went--thrilled to have the first day done and anticipating class on Wednesday.  We will be teaching our first 20 minute lesson next Monday!  Will give you all the details then!

Gary thought it was all great.  "They showed us in one day what the next 4 months will be like!"

XO Ellie and Gary and see you tomorrow!