What is a CELTA course like?

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Week 2

"That's the great thing about the course: you're not stuck on your own - there are other people that will help you"

Had teaching Upper Intermediate been easier? "Well, you'd think it would be," Rob said "but I've just spent the last 10 days being very economical with my language, like when giving instructions, but if you use the same language at higher levels you just come across as being patronising."

Rob had been a bit worried about the change, but today's class seemed to have gone okay. They were talking about "mysteries of the universe", and preparing the class involved getting four pictures and some text off the Internet. The students had to match the pictures and the text and the material had also been there as prompts to get them talking.

At higher levels Rob found there was much more of a concentration on vocabulary, one reason why it's harder, perhaps, because we're talking about subtle differences of meaning. One of the pictures was of a post-mortem of an "alien" supposedly carried out by the US military - and the corresponding text contained the words "fake" and "forgery". The difference?

That's exactly what the students asked! What is the difference? "I still don't know, to be honest," Rob laughed - though he did then produce what sounded like a pretty convincing explanation.

The hardest thing about the course

What was the hardest thing about the course, had he found, so far? "The amount of work", was the rapid response. "Last week I thought lesson planning took a lot of time but now I'm realising just how much."

"It's not just planning the procedure," Rob explained, "it's planning for every eventuality, researching every word - the pronunciation, the stress patterns, and so on". But it was "still manageable", he thought and wasn't completely stressed out - "yet!"

Apart from planning the lessons you're actually going to teach, there are also assignments that have to be handed in - Rob had one, no two, to do for Monday, 1,500 words.

Getting help

"Some of us are going to meet up on Saturday morning and work on one of them together," Rob said. "That's the great thing about the course: you're not stuck on your own - there are other people that will help you."

And that's not just the tutors. The other trainees help, too. Rob got another girl who'd being doing Upper last week to run her eye over his texts and got her to suggest which words they were going to find problematic - and, sure enough, those were the ones.

Time for socialising

Socialising? Well, the tutors suggested that they took last weekend off ("I think they maybe just meant Saturday," Rob said), and certainly they'd all been out together on Friday night!

And had he seen much of Barcelona? "Well, I certainly know the Ramblas quite well!" he said. And he had been to see Barça last week - and they'd been drawn against Celtic in the quarter finals of the UEFA Cup, with the second leg on the very last day of the course on which Rob had to teach.

Now for an Irishman, could it be that that would be the highlight of the course…?

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