Experiencing Work Experience

Older students often told us during our first year that the first year is the most difficult one and that the next two years would be gone in the blink of an eye. Since we’d only meet maybe half of them during the week, we really believed them, but only before we saw our winter semester timetable.

During my first year, I was accustomed to leaving school before lunch. I was taking twelve courses in total, but they were distributed quite comfortably across the timetable and so it wasn’t an issue for me to show up at work every afternoon. This year, we only have eight courses, but they are messily scattered all across the week. Unlike last year, I have also had to get used to the fact that these courses require homework, because when it comes to, say, English Literature or the course dedicated to the works of Franz Kafka, you absolutely have to follow the golden rule: “If you can’t come prepared, don’t come at all.”

A major new element has been added to our schedule: practical teaching experience, naturally, which I would like to write about in this latest post. So what exactly does work experience look like at AKCENT? During the first week, we were divided into three groups of three (already) teaching students and we received the schedule of our practical teaching assignments. The classes we teach are 180 minutes long in total, and each of us is responsible for teaching one part of it. We start with 30-minute lessons, which then extend to 45 minutes, 60 minutes, etc., and finally we teach the entire class ourselves in the year’s last work experience module. Our group of students includes six students, most of them older, whose levels of accomplishment are between A1 and A2. We spent last year observing these students, and so we are aware of both their language skills and their hobbies and interests, which is also very important for teaching. We teach them once every three weeks: we receive our assignment on the first Monday, we present it to our supervisor the following Monday, and the week after that we’re already standing in front of the class.

I dedicated my first 30-minute class to television shows and preferences for them. Since our course only consists of older women, I have a considerable advantage over my [male] colleagues. At the beginning of our lessons, I am always flooded by compliments on my outfit, my hairdo, or my nails, which is always so nice to hear, and thus, instead of a planned lead-in, we always immerse ourselves in chatting about fashion trends, which relieves us all of stress. When it comes to the lesson’s theme itself, I scored some bonus points with the ladies during our very first lesson thanks to the fact that I’m a passionate fan of the Ulice [The Street] TV show. All in all, if you want to discuss TV shows with my students, you will find that, for instance, “Vilma Nyklová likes to gossip” or that “Anička Lišková should get over it”.

I should also mention that our group members are on a rotation to cover a different aspect of the language every time. In my first lesson, I focused on vocabulary, dedicating the next 45-minute lesson to grammar and listening. This time I had prepared a recording about a man working as a marine biologist for the ladies to listen to. During the first part of that lesson, my colleague was teaching the students the vocabulary relevant for the description of various occupations and also the categories into which we can place the occupations. I therefore followed up in his unit with a discussion of dream jobs, and I was pleased to hear from the ladies that it would be a shame to waste my potential as a flight attendant and that I was much better suited for the classroom. The objective of playing the recording was to introduce the students to common phrases used to express likes and dislikes. To my surprise, the ladies had no difficulty understanding the recording at all, and so we had plenty of time to practice the new phrases and to learn even more new things about each other.

For my next lesson, I should focus on the sequence of tenses so that the students can describe events that take place simultaneously, and all that under the topic of transportation. I hope that we won’t get to the issue of road accidents, though, because I’ve never met a person who has experienced more bizarre road accidents than me. But that’s a story for another time.

To conclude, I should note that although this semester is taking up a lot of my free time I’m really happy at school and I’m glad that the curriculum at AKCENT is so diverse. I wish all my friends, readers, and the entire Kellner Family Foundation a Merry Christmas and a peaceful start in 2018.
 

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