CELTA Day 2 : Pain.
The morning lesson went far worse than I had anticipated. I forgot the tape for one of the exercises, got flustered and rushed bits I should have extended to compensate (and which the students would have benefited from), leaving me with only my fallback extension exercise which I would have needed even if I hadn't skipped the audio work. The last ten minutes particularly were a complete waste of the students time. Even wothout the tape issue however there were several problems. I completely failed to get the students even slightly motivated. Despite my best efforts they remained near motionless, and only spoke English if I was right alongside them at the time. As soon as I moved more than two meters from them they reverted back to Bulgarian. I have an idea for dealing with that if it reoccurs on Tuesday. My timing was way off, and my written dialogue example contained other terminology that many of them didn't know, which caused some disraction.

It could have gone worse, but not by much.

In feedback, the tutor explained that he was glad I said I felt it had been a disaster, as he would not have liked having to correct me if I'd said I thought it went ok. The other two "newbies" did rather better, though again none of the classes were graded better than "fail".

The afternoon lectures went smoothly enough, including the language lesson which I'd been worried about. It actually turned out quite fun, and definitely the lowest stress level section to date.

Four of us went out to find a coffee shop or similiar for a brief chat and snack before several of the group had to show up for their observation exercises. Michelle and I headed deeper into the town for further snacking and conversation. Michelle is 20, from the US and is living quite a distance from the group of three I'm part of. We killed time till about 10pm and before delivering Michelle to her place and heading back to my own room. A few minutes of music and reading and a brief LJ-Update text to post later, and its time to snooze.