Liverpool

I went to Liverpool for a weekend away and I didn't regret it. Liverpool has a lot of stories to offer. Where should I begin?

Albert's dock is a huuuge port. Or at least it was. The buildings were turned into museums. Tate gallery, Ship building museum with Titanic and Lusitania ... One of the most impressive museums is probably the International slavery museum. Since Liverpool had a very important port at that time, that was the place where most of the black slaves from africa were imported to. I will never get this slavery thing. Where did they get an idea like this? What if someone enslaved them? That probably wouldn't be so nice any more. One of the most important things in this museum to me, was the contemporary slavery and their campaign to stop it. Prostitution, trafficking, you name it. It's there.

The next thing are, of course, The Beatles! Do you love them? Or at least like tem? I do. :) They come from Liverpool and that's also where their museum, The Beatles Story is. You can walk through their story, listen to their great music all the time and get to know them better. They still keep their spirit around by running the cavern club where you can listen to live music every night. And drink beer and sing, of course. I realized some of their lyrics are really amazing.

What about football? Do you watch football? I know I have some American readers here and you know what? We are playing in the same group at the world cup. Algeria, Slovenia, England and America. Who do you think will win these matches? :) I'm not convinced by Slovene football but I saw that you can be a football fan if there is some good football to watch. English people are very faithful and supportive fans of their teams. We visited Liverpool football club's stadium and listened to its stories. There is a sad story about the hillsborough disaster. The club commemorated the deaths od 96 faithful fans with this mosaic:

What did I miss? Oh yeah, I know... Fish & chips and the beer!

And most important of all, the town was really nice, the people were ver friendly and even the weather wasn't very English. Wanna visit Liverpool? I definitely recommend it. :)

Poppy

Teaching practice report no. 2

The second week of my teaching practice was English week. Since I'm a double major student I teach two subjects: Slovene language and English language.

Teaching English is more fun because you can prepare absolutely anythin as long as it is related to the topic you're teaching. I didn't complicate much, I just prepared A LOOOOOT of photos. Learners, especially young ones, love interesting photos. Like this one, for teaching Present continuous tense:

What is Fluffy doing at the moment? He is watching TV. :)

What is he watching? "He is watching Animal planet!"

I was learning all the time, my other, mentor, a teacher of English was very helpful to me, she pointed out my weaknesses and praised my strengths. She especially liked my worksheets and Power Point presentations, that definitely drew children's attention.

I also get along with other teachers well. I would like to just stay there and chat and drink coffee forever. :D I like the school, I like the kids I like more or less everything. They said I should wait a bit and see the real picture, but still ... :)

Tomorrow's saturday but due to the wind day this school has to make up for the lost day. We are joining the national event "Let's clean Slovenia in one day". We'll be cleaning the rubbish around the town and trying to clean all the plastic bags that got stuck in the trees because of the wind. My mentor said I could stay at home because there will be no English or Slovene language related activities but I thought I could chat some more ... I just have to find my gloves ... :)

Poppy

Teaching practice report no. 1

Ah! I thought I would have so much to tell you I would write every day! I do have a lot to tell you but I really have NO time to write. :)

The first week of my teaching practice went well. My mentor is an easy going person so she didn't complicate and just let me do what I needed to do. I learned quite a lot in a week:

- A wrist watch is a must. I'm going to buy one today because I don't have it. I never wear any jewelry but when you teach you just have to know how much time you have left.

- Teaching = 50% of actual teaching + 50% of paper work. At least now it is, when I'm stil unexperienced and I HATE it. :)

- Children are smarter than you think. :)
- Keep it simple.
- You have to look good. Not supermodel but nicely dressed and tidy. Children notice.
- Use their humour in your own profit. Avoiding it is impossible. :)

However, I taught 3 lessons last week. The first one was so-so. My Power Point presentation wasn't very cooperative and sabotaged me. :) There wasn't enough time ... but we did it anyway. My second one went ok but still not perfect. I was a bit unfocused and children probably noticed that. And they were too hardworking so we didn't manage to finish everything. Again. :) The third one was the first normal lesson I taught. I wasn't so nervous any more and I managed to put everything into 45 minutes.

Children are funny. :) I know many of them because they are my neighbours or my friends' younger siblings or archery club members or whatever. I guess they liked me too, since some of them asked me if I could be their teacher next year, because their teacher is going to have a baby in September. I would be happy to be their teacher, but I still have to finish my education.

My friends find it funny. I told them I probably wouldn't like teaching and I'm not even that good with children but surprisingly I quite like it now. It's my birthday today and one of my friends got me a teacher-ish present: a packet of blackboard chalks! :) I'll save it for my first real teaching job. ;)

Poppy

Liverpooool!

Yesterday I was spending my last day at uni before teaching practice break. My boyfriend was annoying me on the Gtalk while I was intending to study for today's term test. (lol) He said we should go somewhere during the break. But where should we go?

Let's look for the cheapest Ryanair tickets and then just go there. Sardegna? Could be ... but hostels are a bit expensive .... Birmingham? Hmm.. what's there to see? Well.. not much ... Liverpool? Hmm.. interesting idea! 2 return plane tickets for 98 €, a very nice hostel for 18€ per day ... that's really nice for a student-ish budget!

And so it happened. From boring rainy afternoon to exciting trip-planning. We'll go see the Beatles museum! And maybe Liverpool FC stadium. Or take a train to Manchester! Niiice. :)

I'm an English language major and I haven't been to an English speaking country yet. This is only a 4-day trip but you have to start somewhere, right? :) I'll send you a postcard. ;)

(You really can't find anything else when you Google "Liverpool" :)) )

Poppy

My first time teaching

Yeah Yeah I know ... teaching AGAIN. But it's the teaching month now, since our teaching practice starts in a week.

Yesterday I was teaching for the first time. I was nervous, I couldn't sleep, I didn't know if my lesson plan was ok, I felt like I would run out of time, I was afraid pupils wouldn't talk at all, I was afraid of more or less everything. (Although my menthor, whom I only met through e-mail, was very encouraging: "Don't worry, everything will be fine".)



Thanks to heterogeneous groups type of lessons they have at that school (they make 3 smaller groups from the usual 2) there was only 15 pupils at my lesson yesterday. They were nice, they were standing up until I greeted them, they sat down and waited. I started with my lesson and they were surprisingly cooperative. They answered my questions, they did what I told them to do and to my horror we were done with the "theoretical" part of the lesson in 20 minutes! Ooops ... Well in the end that wasn't really that bad because they needed some more time to do the practical part.

You see, my topic were 2 formal text forms: bill form and order form. Pretty dull topic, I know. They knew everything in theory but they had some problems when they had to fill them in so I think 25 minutes for doing that wasn't too much.

Of course I had to deal with some special people - they are 15 now so I guess you can imagine what that means. Teenagers: extra hormones and extra I-wanna-be-noticed thing. :)


To sum up, I think I did ok, regarding the topic that was pretty boring. It was, after all, my first time. :) Now I'm a bit more motivated and I'm going to start writing lesson plans for my teaching practice right now! :)

Poppy

Sharing

I have problems with sharing.

You see, at our faculty (and probably everywhere else) it's usual that every new generation of students of a certain major creates an e-mail account so that the teachers can send us meterials and the students share everything we have. It works in theory! Or, to be honest, the teacher part works. When it comes to students it just doesn't.

I can't understand it! I typed my Slovene literature II notes last year and at the end of the semester I sent that file to our e-mail for everyone to have. I did the same with this year's 1st semester's Slovene literature III notes. I sent my papers, I sent my presentations, I sent useful things I found online, I sent study materials I made for myself. No problem. Do you know what happens next? I send an e-mail asking for some notes I didn't have and ... no one answered.

And that's not all! In the last few months it happened that someone just deleted some files, for example the list of literature we need for some exam. I mean, you just can't be that rude and competitive.

Especially now, when we are preparing for our teaching practice. We made an agreement to send our lesson plans to other people but guess what happened again! There were exactly 3 plans sent and only two of them aren't mine.

It really makes me so angry. There are 60 people and only few of them are selfless enough to share. Why couldn't we all benefit from everyone's work?

Poppy

Tutoring problems

A student has to earn her living. So I tutor. I tutor 2 girls with a lot of difficulties with English language. One of them is really a tough case. With regular once-a-week tutoring she scored 27 percent on her test and a week later, after an urgent tutor weekend she scored 32 percent. I gues I'll have to try harder.

This particular problem is about my 11 year old sister whom I help with her English homework and studying from time to time. She contacts me during the week and I can tell you... tutoring over the phone or over Gmail chat is messy. Yesterday she was asking me all the time: "What does this word mean? How do you say this word in English?" I was a bit sick of it so I told her she has 3 different dictionaries and she's old and intelligent enough to look those word up.

"But, but .... "
"Look them up!"

A few hours later she called me because she didn't know what to do with her homewor. She had those weird words "present simple" written in her notebook and a list of some more weird words. "What is present simple??" It's a tense my dear. And those words are verbs. You have to use them in a sentence.

"PLAYS. What goes with plays? He, she ot it. You got that one right. What does this "she" play? Basketball. Ok. Now write that down." And then I heard her typing.

- "Are you typing your homework?
- "No, I'm checking it in a dictionary."
- "Amm.. first of all, dictionaries don't translate sentences and second of all .... don't you know what "she", "play" and "basketball" mean??"
- "Yeah but ... you said I have to look it up."
- "Not if you already understand it!!"
- "Oh... I thought that was a bit weird ... "


You see ... I have problems with tutoring. That's because I demand a bit of common sense! I think I should kidnap her and take her to a 3-weeks "I-can-think-with-my-own-head" camp! :)

Poppy