I am learning to teach

And suddenly it's almost two months that I have been attending AKCENT College in Prague. Here, I study Englis. Most of my subjects are in English, I deal with its phonetics, linguistic and also its long history. In the second part I learn how to apply this knowledge into teaching, mainly through didactics, psychology and pedagogy.

Already in the first week I have met not only all of my classmates, but also all of my subjects and lecturers, out of which few had already given me a hard time. I have to say that IB has given me a great advantage here in a Czech school, which can seem like an advantage, but it doesn't always have to be that way.

It is important to say that this school is very small. In the entire building there are not more that 4 classrooms and in my class there are 12 students, which according to some lecturer are some record breaking numbers. On the first day we had an introduction to psychology, where we sat in desks organized in the form of a letter “U” and we went around the room, answering whether we encountered psychology before. Most of my classmates answered with a simple “no”,“not really”, “just the basics”. I was starting to get nervous to when I had to answer that question. “Well, somewhat. I did psychology in IB, I replicated a couple of famous experiment, mainly from CLOA…” Suddenly, I could feel the whole class watching me and that's when I realized it was time to stop talking. The only person who disagreed with this was the professor, who insisted on me talking about all of my studies. This earned me the title of “colleague” right away. Wonderful.

General didactics. In the first class we were talking about the different systems of classification and the words “internal” and “external” were mentioned. The professor explained the difference between these two given terms and emphasized that external evaluation is not very common in the Czech Republic, then she proceeded to ask us students, whether we have ever encountered such a thing. Silence. I slowly raised my hand, which immediately caught the attention of the professor, who excitedly exclaimed: “I see we have someone with more experience here!” And again: “Well in IB it works in a way only some work is evaluated internally and most of the assignments, such as the written assignment or the IOP are sent out and evaluated by external moderators.” I am sitting in the last desk and now I can see not only 12 pair of eyes staring at me, but also bodies turning around completely to look at me. I don't intend to continue, but the professor starts talking about the English educational system. I just nod when she asks me: “So you have experience with this kind of a system?” I nod slightly and answer quietly: “Yes, I went to a Czech-English gymnasium” “Oh, so you went to Open Gate? Well you have to tell us all about that, colleague” Colleague again. Brilliant.

For the rest of the day I don't plan to say anything else, but others are not making this very easy for me. My professor for cultural history of English speaking countries has done IB and thus after spending approximately one minute on each of my classmates, spends about 5 minutes discussing how difficult it was to write the TOK essay or EE with me. When we started doing exercises from English, I was just promptly told by my teacher that this wasn't the correct classroom, that I was to have English with the second and third years. But my day didn't end there. I still had to go to Spanish class. In Spanish the professor introduces herself with basic sentences, which she then proceeds to write on the board. I raise my shaking hand and say: “„Hola señora, me llamo Bára y tengo una pequeña problema. Nuestro curso no ofrece nivel más alto de esto y es que estoy estudiando español por 5 años, entonces me parece tonto tomarlo, hay otras posibilidades para mi, por favor?“ Again those staring eyes. I was sent to the building next door, to AKCENT international house, where there is a B1 course that I attend on Wednesday evening together with a few adults. It's still not as good, but those people enjoy the sessions very much and since their level is not very high, I spend most of my time teaching them alongside the teacher.

This is what the IB struggles look like in real life. Other than that there is a lot of things that are new for me, just as much as they are new for my classmates, for example phonetics and the transcription connected with it. Thanks to my previous knowledge from IB I have a lot more free time, that I mostly spend by working in the field gastronomie, but I can assure you that I spend at least two hours a day on transcription alone. /aɪ θɪŋk aɪ æmˈgɛtɪŋ kwaɪt gʊd, raɪt?/

Last few sentences are dedicated to none other that THE KELLNER FAMILY FOUNDATION, to which I am very thankful for giving me the opportunity to be able to do this and I am sure that the next blog entry is going to be full of so much more experience.