panditas

so today we did our first actual teaching. we were all 3 of us petrified. i had to teach a recap of yesterday´s lesson that we had observed, and then introduce conjunctions. skye had to teach modal verbs, which are the hardest things ever, and jayne had to do a recap lesson on ´used to´. we all survived, via quite a lot of cigarettes beforehand. despite our fear, i think we all quite enjoyed it. once the first 5 minutes of hello i´m lucy i´m from england blah blah are over, it´s not too scary, the kids are really nice, they were well behaved, and may have even learnt something. we have celebrated with some beer but are quite exhausted after our ordeal. no more teaching practice until next week now. tomorrow is halloween, we can go to the school in the evening dressed as pumpkins. unfortunately i didn´t think in july to bring my pumpkin outfit round south america with me, so may give it a miss.

in other news
joseph conrad, the polish author, learnt how to write his books in english by reading the oxford english dictionary while sailing around (he was a sailor). he wrote one book for each of the seas (5), and posted them to his english publisher. when he finally arrived in england he couldn´t speak a word of english, but had learnt to write it via just the dictionary. goes against all our theories of learning so far, but juan told us it, so it must be a valid point.

this morning in our coffee break with juan, we were talking about how we will go to the gym tomorrow in our free halloween afternoon. juan : oh but you 2 ladies are fine, your bodies are great, i saw you swimming [me and jayne]. us : oh, um, thanks. juan to skye (as she was tucking into a bag of sweets): and you skye, you shouldn´t worry, you will lose your weight as you get a bit older, you shouldn´t worry you know.
skye is not even fat, the whole conversation was hilarious, i think in mexico it isn´t considered rude at all to refer to people like this, it´s not meant as a compliment or an insult, just a sort of statement. must be a cultural difference, maybe i will highlight it in my next lesson. (i checked with skye i could publish this and she was fine about it).

re the grammar comment from alex (hello and welcome to my blog, you are my first unknown reader, this is very exciting) - yes, he said we as teachers should know grammar inside out, but never (or at least rarely) use the terminology and bombard them with it. and having observed 3 very different lessons yesterday, i would say he is absolutely correct - the grammar centric one was boring and not effective. juan is very sensitive to the fact that each teacher is totally different and if you feel comfortable and happy teaching that way then that is fine, as long as the students are learning, then that is the main thing. it boils down to different approaches etc. i would go on, but have frazzled brain cells.

all for now, very tired. sorry for phone number ineptitude, will investigate further. xx