Week 1 of CTESOL Classes

Ciao, Tutti!

I present my flowchart of the turbulent emotions of week 1 of my CTESOL (Certificate for Teaching English as a Second Language) classes:

Friday, May 7 - Cried in bed from loneliness, realizing all my best friends now live away from home, and I care about such things now. Went to the MET, but it didn't make me feel much better.

Saturday, May 8 - Had brunch with Owl Eyes before my flight. It's always exciting to spend time with those energetic friends of mine! Then caught my flight, which was delayed 3 1/2 hours and had to land in Salt Lake City to refuel.

Sunday, May 9 - Arrived home at 1:oo am. Any chance to get over jet-lag before classes started was squelched. Tried to have a relaxing day.

Monday, May 10 - Thrown into the mix. Handed a lesson to plan for "teacher practice" on the next day and another for Thursday. Apparently missed an important introductory week, and the instructor used TESOL jargon I'd never heard before (Lexis? Concept Check? Ss? What?????). Thank goodness there was another latecomer! Our instructor, though, is wonderful and patient, and already I learned a lot, enough to feel I could start my lesson plan without being completely blind. Longest day of classes since high school. How do those guys handle a full day of classes?

Speaking of high school, bumped into my high school English teacher on the way to the subway. We mutually pretended not to recognize each other.

Tuesday, May 11 - It turns out I've always been nervous in front of a class, though not knowing the level of the students beforehand didn't help. They were more advanced than I had anticipated, and I finished a little earlier than expected, even after using all my back-up activities. Overall, though? I was getting the hang of things around there, even though I was still yet to sleep well. Bonus: I finished John Wray's newest novel, Lowboy.

Wednesday, May 12 - J.J. Cale says: "Wednesday's hump day, hump day's Wednesday. The week's half gone." I felt so full after every lesson period that I can't even talk to people. The last time my head felt this heavy was... Cold War/Spy Novel class at NYU last semester. Speaking of NYU, as I was heading home on the train many of my friends were listen to Alec Baldwin at their - their - graduation ceremony. I was indescribably overjoyed I missed that!

Thursday, May 13 - The second class went much better than the first, even though things still didn't go as planned. I guess this means I'm learning something and getting better in general at this. Learned about teaching business English. I have no interest in teaching business English, but we still learned some interesting things about cultural awareness. All in all, our instructor rocks, and we earn our money's worth in the classroom.

Friday, May 14 - We talked about teaching children. Safe to say: parents can be creepy human beings at times. I'm much more afraid of a pair of them than a classroom of their bite-sized monsters. Went to Rasputin's in San Francisco to celebrate, hoping to buy the new LCD Soundsystem (which doesn't seem to come out until this Tuesday, sadly). Got scared by its size and headed home empty-handed.

Will there be a time in my life when I'm not tired out of my mind? Better yet, will I ever get a moment to celebrate my apparent graduation? Perhaps I'll be able to celebrate with a Turkish job interview and be amply prepared to teach English as a second language. Because in real life we don't get to let time stop, do we. Maybe that's why everyone else says the time has gone by so fast, when I feel like it's taken forever, and I'm still not done.

-Sam goldsmith