Fun and Games

Next Saturday, 8^th March, I’be doing a workshop during the TESOL Spain convention in Madrid. It’s my first workshop for TESOL Spain and I’m really excited! In November 2013 I had the pleasure of sharing my ideas with the teachers attending the TESOL France colloquium in Paris. Although I can’t say for sure if everyone enjoyed themselves, the attendance surpassed all my expectations. Let’s hope it’s going to be the same next week!

To cut a long story short, the workshop is a reflection of my newly discovered attitude to teaching which you could probably call ‘less is more’. Recently I’ve become a sucker for any sort of games or activities that are adaptable to many levels and reusable. I guess I just got really tired of worksheets and spending hours looking for appropriate stuff in books and online. Or maybe my inner self wants to go green? ;)

Anyway, if you’re in Madrid, feel invited! I’s going to take place at 17.00.

All the speakers were asked to fill in a questionnaire about themselves as a part of the Meet the Speakers initiative. You can take a look at them here.

Below you can see my abstract for the conference.

Fun and Games

We spend hours looking for supplementary materials and then copying and cutting what we find.

Having done just that for the past couple of years, I’ve had enough. Therefore I decided to focus on games and activities that are adaptable, reusable and require little or no preparation.

Sounds interesting?

Then come and join us! Audience participation is required!

Keep your fingers crossed everyone and hope to see you there!

ELT Spain

I began looking for events or teachers' associations the moment I started living in Spain.
The problem is... it's all kind of chaotic in here!

There's TESOL Spain that organizes a conference once a year but unless you live in Madrid or Barcelona, your chances of being close to any form of professional development are rather slim. If you don't specifically look for an event, there is no way you'll find it.

That is why I've decided to create a ELT Spain page on Facebook. It's a site for any enthusiastic EFL teachers based in Spain (and not only!). I created it as a meeting place - hopefully, it'll become a great sharing and developing centre in the future.
Anyone can post on the ELT Spain wall, as long as you're going to tell us something related to ELT of course :)

Do you want to share an interesting idea?
Have you heard of an ELT event organized in your area?

Feel free to contribute and join in!

Where have you been?

Dear all,

I’ve been planning to blog again and/or explain my absence so many times, that, to be honest, I lost count. 

Having a blog IS like having a baby and, I ‘m very sorry for my readers and my blog – I HAVE neglected you.

The thing is – I was never planning to do so. But... it happened. Somehow.

New country, new city, new job, new working hours, new people… and a language I didn’t know (and still struggle with).

So suddenly it was either, or…

It’s a cliché to say I didn’t have time but that’s exactly what it was like. Coming home around 8 or 9 p.m. (lucky me!) definitely didn’t contribute to the success of this blog.  And at the weekend – there was so much to read and so much to catch up with that after a few weeks, I had to give up. Either do your job well or don’t do it at all.

The consequences have been grave indeed.

Apart from feeling completely left out and pretty much clueless about the most recent events and scandals of ELT, my blog has disappeared from quite a few blogrolls.

A few days ago, my Twitter account has been hacked and had it not been for Vicky Loras, I wouldn’t have even realized. That was a shock.

And me?

I’ve read, travelled a bit, tried teaching myself Spanish, made friends.

Am I happy?

Very much indeed :) But I miss Istanbul terribly.

So now what?

Having spent a year in Pamplona working for the local IH, I have recently moved to Zaragoza where I’ll also work for IH.  

Will I have time to blog?

I do hope so!

Keep your fingers crossed for me (again)! 

From Spain about Spain

It’s so good to be back on track!

I finally got the Internet at home and have so much to catch up with! So many new posts, a new version of Twitter and the Virtual Round Table conference!

Almost everyone has been asking me what happened (‘You said you were staying in Poland!’) and where I ended up – so here we go :)

Where I live now

I’m currently working at Clen College IH Pamplona in Spain. I never actually planned to work in Spain but… it sort of happened. It’s been almost a month since I got here and I slowly started settling in. The decision to leave Poland and work abroad again was pretty sudden. As in the case of leaving Turkey, there are tons of reasons behind my decision which I don’t really feel like discussing here.

In order to avoid confusion and to answer all the questions, I’ve divided all my musing into a few categories. Enjoy!

Work

-I teach 22.5 hours a week (1 hour=60 min) and my timetable consists of YL, teenage and adult classes

-As I live very close to the Medebaldea center (the school has 2 more), most of my classes were scheduled to take place there. It takes me 5min to get to work on foot which is awesome especially after travelling to school for more than an hour in Istanbul.

-I also get to teach in a public Catholic school called Larraona and Ikastola San Fermin (Ikastola means school in Basque as I was told)

-Every Tuesday and Thursday I walk for 25 min to get to Mutua Navarra for my 7.30 off site company class - don’t mind the walk though – the students are great there!

-My biggest challenge will be the, already famous on Twitter, 3 year olds. As I have never taught such small kids, it’s going to be tough. During my first class one girl started crying and I had no idea why. I’ll update you on how things go :)

-After a two year break – I got three adult groups – all on a Pre-Intermediate level. How I enjoy these classes!

-Some of my classes are in blocks and the longest one is 4.5 hours without any breaks. By no breaks I mean no breaks. The classes are scheduled as follows: 16-18, 18-19, 19-20.30. No comment.

-We were all handed cheap MP3 players in order to download all the tracks we need. There are no CDs available to use so everyone has to carry the MP3 player and the speakers all day long to every school they teach in. Interesting.

Spain and Pamplona – first impressions and observations

-Trying to get the Internet at home is a pain. That’s all I have to say about it. Eventually you end up buying one of these ridiculously expensive USB sticks or whatever they are called or knock on the neighbours’ doors asking for their password offering money in return.

-Shops close on Sundays. Only bars and cinemas are open. If you want to buy bread on Sunday – fat chance!

-Dubbing in cinemas will drive me mad. Apparently there is no chance to watch films with subtitles in Pamplona.

-It seems impossible to pay with a 500Euro banknote – none of the shops or restaurants want to accept it.

-People jog a lot, even at 7 am when I go to work.

-You can buy cigarettes either in special tobacco shops or from vending machines in bars.

-There are tons of twins around – is that a Pamplona thing?

-Wines here are awesome and food is great – people who were telling me that the pintxos in Pamplona are delicious were 100% right!

-It seems impossible to buy a prepaid sim card without buying a phone – the shop assistants always say they have just run of them so everyone ends up buying the phone as well.

-The siesta. From around 14 till 16 shops, banks, offices etc close down. Every day. Why didn’t we have it in Turkey I wonder?

-I simply love entering supermarkets and seeing the jamón after living without pork products for three years :)

Life


-Life is OK now - it was harder at the beginning without the Internet but now things are fine. It’s not paradise though – starting your life from scratch in a foreign country is always tough at the beginning. Once you’ve experienced it, you know it takes time to make friends and start feeling comfortable.

-Thanks to Couch Surfing I managed to meet some very nice people who took me around and gave some useful tips concerning Pamplona and life in Spain in general – in case you’re reading this – thanks a bunch!

-I still don’t know where exactly my apartment is located. Seems like its somewhere between Medebaldea and Barañain. But then again there is Etxabakoitz which is close as well. No, I haven’t misspelled that – Etxabakoitz. It’s gonna take me weeks to learn how to pronounce that so don’t worry if you can’t.

-I live with a lovely Hungarian couple – Katalin and Peter. Katalin works at Clen College as well and I’ve just learned that her CELTA tutor in Hungary was working with me in Poland 4 years ago. Small world!

-People keep calling me Ana which I will probably have to accept soon :)

Spanish students and teaching in Spain


-I was warned many times that they can be naughty and talkative, misbehaving and nasty. So far, I haven’t really noticed that.

-The first thing I realized having entered the classroom was the students’ pronunciation – sometimes I have no idea what they are saying. The sound /g/ is the biggest issue as it almost always gets pronounced as /h/. There seems to be an issue with /s/ and / ʃ/ as well but I have yet to figure out why.

-Some students here don’t think of themselves as Spanish. They say they speak Euskera (not Basque) and feel very proud of that. Sensitive issue?

-Teaching English seems so much easier than back in Poland in Turkey. So many words in Spanish are similar to their English equivalents that you end up saving a lot of precious classroom time for explanations.

-Last week one of my teenage students asked for a translation in Spanish and didn’t get one. What followed was a 10 min discussion – the students simply couldn’t understand how one can decide to live in a foreign country without speaking the language spoken there. Does that mean I’m crazy having made such a decision?

Learning Spanish

-So far my knowledge of Spanish consists of random words and phrases such as ‘una caña’ ‘si’ and ‘cafe con leche’ :)

-I should be starting classes after 19th Oct but so far I’ve been using this wonderful site to learn the basics (The Mi Vida Loca series is fantastic!)

-After Turkey, it’s pretty easy to figure out what people are saying even without knowing the language so, well...

Plans

Where I'm going soon 

-The only thing planned for now is a trip to Zaragoza on the 12th October but it has absolutely nothing to do with blogging or ELT. It’s going to be pure fun, inşallah :) I’m planning to visit the Virgen Del Pilar as, believe it or not, she seems to be one responsible for me being where I am now :)

-I definitely have to learn Spanish.

-I'm waiting impatiently for some of my friends to come and visit and I do hope to meet some other bloggers from Spain soon!


I'm really sorry I wasn't able to make it to the IATEFL Poland in Bydgoszcz this year but there is TESOL France coming up in November. I've already bought the tickets and booked a hotel so hope to meet some of you in Paris!

A very quick update

I´m terribly sorry for not posting anything in a very long while but there has been so many changes in my life that I found it difficult to catch up at times.

Anyway, as some of you may have already heard, I ended up in Pamplona, Spain.

We´ll see how things will work out here but I'm pretty positive about this experience :)

The main issue is - I have no Internet access at home so until I get it, I will have to stay away from blogging, Twitter and my PLN. I´m doing everything I can to fix this problem asap but god knows how long it´s going to last.

Who said life in Spain will be easy...

Keep your fingers crossed everyone! :)