Online Diary: TEFL in Playa del Carmen from our 2008 Scholarship winner! (1)
Friday, 6th February 2009
Georgina Newcombe, winner of the 2008 Suzanne Furstner Scholarship, gives us her first installment in the run-up to her Mexico experience.
The countdown to my CELTA begins. Instinctively, through academic dedication or blind panic, I’ve started to dissect sentences for their rules of grammar. I’d been informed during my telephone interview with International House that a ‘pre-course assignment’ would be emailed to me to prepare me for the CELTA. Expecting a few vague questions along the lines of ‘What do you hope to achieve from this course?’ - closely followed by ‘Congratulations, you’re halfway there already!’ - imagine my shock when a 35 page Dostoevsky-like manuscript show-horned its bulk into my hard-drive.
The most worrying subject is that of tense. Past perfect? Future simple? I somehow mistook one sentence to be the Past Simple Perfect Progressive, which apparently doesn’t exist, but which may well have unwittingly opened a portal into another dimension, crashed a fleet of jumbo jets, or set off a nuclear power facility in Arizona. And I’m not alone in this: there’s a whole generation of thirty-somethings who were denied grammar lessons at school; who still believe an imperative is something served to stimulate the appetite at dinner parties. Unbelievable, that I completed an English degree barely knowing a noun from a verb. The shame of it! I feel like I’m eighteen again and about to take my driving test. And I am a terrible driver. Now it’s not pedestrians I’m swerving round, but conditional constructions and frequency adverbs. I keep telling myself that no matter how doubtful my abilities, no-one has ever been knocked over by twenty-miles-an-hour bad teaching; that, while it may be mildly embarrassing to mistake an acronym for an antonym, it’s far less serious than mistaking the brake for the accelerator, and so I should just calm down and take it as it comes.
Then there are the more practical considerations of flights, passports and pounds-to-the-peso, not to mention the fact that I can’t speak any Spanish. My parents, in a moment of techno-ignorance, posted me an iPhrase lingua-doo-dah: a Berlitz digital phrasebook designed exclusively for the iPod. I hadn’t the heart to tell them I’ve never owned such a contraption: to people of my parents’ age, almost anything small and hand-held can be misconstrued as an iPod, including - but not limited to - mobile phones, digital cameras, remote controls and biofeedback machines. After hours of frustration, I managed to successfully convert the files to my MP3 player, with the unfortunate exception of any accompanying text. In fact, the text has converted so haphazardly, any phrase longer than ‘the wine menu, please’ twists itself into a mangled confusion, something I can only liken to the Greek alphabet littered with dollar signs and upside-down exclamation marks. The result is that I now know a few phrases, but have absolutely no idea how to spell them. I ended up buying a good old-fashioned Spanish dictionary, the kind made out of paper and ink which can’t download Google maps, or steer me into a canal, or interfere with airplane transmissions during take-off and landing.
The winner of last year’s scholarship was warned many people go a little crazy with the pressure of the course. I have visions of myself in week two of the CELTA, surrounded by grammar books and repeating ‘You lookin’ at ME?’ in front of the mirror. Stumbling back through Heathrow Airport in April with two hundred Mexican cigarettes and the hundred-yard stare of a Vietnam vet. But pain and gain have always been bedfellows, so I’m willing to risk any unpleasant side-effects in the pursuit of a new career. Astar lar veestar…
More about the online English Language Awareness course
Tags: scholarship, suzanne furstner scholarship, sff2008, celta, mexico, tefl, spanish
Posted by Laura Harrison 2009-02 under Teaching Languages, Blogs,
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