Last year I went on a crazy expedition, cycling from Land's End to John o' Groats, with a group of 18 strangers, many of them North Americans. We journeyed the length of Britain following a continuous purple line, all in the name of conquering an acronym called LEJOG. In total I cycled 1094 miles in 18 days and I almost destroyed my thighs in the process.
For this year's attempt at self-destruction, I didn't go anywhere. I assembled a new group of 18 strangers but this time, my adventure took place in a basement in the centre of Leeds. and this time it wasn't my legs that got destroyed, it was my brain.
This year's five letter acronym of doom was called CELTA. It's an intensive 4 week course designed to equip you to teach English anywhere in the world. The course is 120 hours long over 20 days, containing 8 teaching practices (TPs) totalling 6 hours, as well as 4 written assignments, and lots and lots of homework.
I know some people who've done the CELTA before. They told me it was really hard work, and not to expect any sleep, or any free time at weekends, and I took all this with a pinch of salt. I thought it was like the legal warnings at the gates to the Monkey Enclosure at Longleat, which say things like 'Be warned! If you stop, these monkeys will tear your car to pieces' And you think 'Yeah right, they probably have to say that for the insurance'. And then you go in and before you know it, they're making off into the trees with your windscreen wipers and your wing mirror and the handle off your sun roof. With the benefit of hindsight, I'd have to say that, if anything, those people who warned me about CELTA, they played it down.....
I chose to do the CELTA at a place called Action English in Leeds, and I have to say, they were excellent throughout. If you're contemplating this kind of madness yourself, you couldn't go to a better asylum.
My journey to the CELTA course every day over the last 4 weeks has reminded me very much of my schooldays. I went to school between 1979 and 1986 less than a mile from Action English. My walk up from the city centre was the same in both cases. My younger self used to walk to school from the centre of Leeds to save the 15p bus money each day, first of all for sweets and then latterly for beer. The daily walk reminded me what temporary creatures we are, as despite the passing of 30 years, much about the walk remains the same, even if my bones are a bit more creaky these days.
Despite LEJOG and CELTA being very different activities, there were certain parallels. Not only the acronyms and the number of participants, and the presence of some North Americans, also some of my routines were the same. As on last year's trip, I got into the habit of eating the same things for lunch every day, to save a bit of thinking time. This year's favourite was cheese and red onion. Also, like last year, the evenings became something of an eating competition, although this year instead of 3 course hotel meals, I called in almost every night to Trinity Kitchen and tried almost every food they have on offer. Indian, Vietnamese, Mexican, Middle Eastern etc, Each day the tea-time blow out on a big takeaway was my reward for surviving the day.
As for the course itself, it was full-on from the start. The first input session on Day 1 was about classroom management. It was made very clear that as teachers of English we are there to create an environment which facilitates learning, not to stand at the front imparting wisdom. I wrote in my notebook during it. 'Take your ego and throw it out the window' And I meant it in two ways:
1) You're not there to be a wise man or a sage, a clown, a show-off or a stand up comedian, You're there to help people learn. If they're not learning, you're not doing your job properly.
2) You're going to get plenty of feedback on your performance, and some of it might be bruising. It's not personal, so don't take it as such. Whatever they say to you, whether you like it or not, take it on the chin and keep going.
But before we taught any lessons ourselves, we had to see how the experts do it.
I've been working for a charity in Leeds called St Vincent's since last October. Mostly being a teaching assistant but I've also done a bit of amateur teaching. After a few months of volunteering I thought my knowledge of the English language was pretty good, but one observed lesson with an expert was enough to reveal whole chasms of missing knowledge. I knew nothing about phonemes and pronunciation and word stress and intonation.
Another thing that stuck with me was my first TP tutor saying that you can have fun in the classroom, but you have to earn the right. I figured out that was mostly going to be by knowing things, and getting something of a handle on phonemes later in the course was one of the parts of the course I enjoyed the most.
It was pretty clear from meeting all the tutors on the course, that they practise what they preach. Every input session was run along the same lines as we were meant to run our own lessons, and every minute was worth paying attention to. I remember thinking by Day 4 that the tutors were all sadists who were enjoying our suffering, but that wore off pretty soon. It was undoubtedly just the tiredness talking. I realised the course is hard for them too, and I know they felt our pain, but they had to be hard on us to get us through. Even in our darker moments and when it was necessary to give us difficult feedback, I always felt that knew and understood what we were going through.
If only I'd had the mental capacity to take it all in. I was writing so fast every day I nearly set fire to my notepad. My brain was so overwhelmed most of the time, the hamster in the wheel of my brain hadn't just died, he'd set on fire and his charred corpse was going round and round the wheel and setting fire to the bedding in the bottom of the cage, which then was becoming a wider fire hazard, which had the potential to burn the whole house down.
My first real crisis came on the morning of Day 4, before my second Teaching Practice (TP2). At 6 am that morning I was ready to quit the course. I'd been awake between 10 pm and 2 am writing my lesson plan for the following day but then I was so tired I'd closed the file without saving the changes and so when I woke up again at 5 am all those changes were lost. Despite the calamity, I talked myself into going in anyway, and the lesson went okay in the end, even if the lesson plan was a bit ropey.
During my volunteering at St Vincent's, even when I've had to take classes myself, I've never felt like a teacher. I always felt like an impostor, someone pretending to be a teacher, but during my TP3, I had a period of around 15 minutes where I actually felt like a teacher. It was like the Matrix subway fight between Neo and Mr Smith. I knew I couldn't beat him yet, but I knew I was good enough to have a go. I was starting to believe....
However, progress can have its ups and downs. My TP4 on Day 10 wasn't such a success. I was so tired by then. I'd been following a sleep pattern advocated by Leonardo da Vinci, which involved going to bed for really short periods of sleep and then getting up again about 3 times a night.
It was a sunny day. Our classroom was in the basement, but it had steps from outside the window leading back out into the real world, and partway through this TP, I really wanted to climb out the window and run away. That hour was like an eternity. It was definitely Crisis Number 2. My intro to the lesson was too obtuse and abstract, and nobody understood it except me, and the lack of clarity knocked all the timings for the lesson to pot.
However, the feedback I got after it was my favourite of the whole course. It was that you can't think outside the box, if you haven't built the box. I've been told before many times that I have a tendency to go off at creative tangents and I often have trouble keeping this in check, but sometimes it's necessary to hold myself back. And so the rest of the course and TPs 5-8 were all about building the box.
Also when I start talking it can easily become mangled into gobbledigook, so I realised the safest thing to do was to get the students to talk instead of me, and luckily that's what we're supposed to do anyway, so problem solved!
Despite the emotional ups and downs on the course, I always tried to keep a sense of perspective, and remember that although it was a course I really, really wanted to pass, it was still only a course. I remembered reading about a female athlete in the Olympics who'd trained for years to perform in a race lasting minutes, and just before her race she calmed herself down by thinking 'It's only the Olympics'. It helped her not to freeze on the day. At times early in the course when I thought I might fail, I reassured myself that even if I fail, the experience wouldn't be wasted. It's only CELTA!
Something else that helped me keep a sense of perspective was thinking about my mum, who died last year. Again, this reminded me that it was only a course, and not life or death. My mum left me a small amount of money when she died, and I spent some of it on doing the course, so even if I'd failed, it would have been her money I was wasting, not my own. It was probably just as well she wasn't around during the course though, she would have only worried that I was running myself into the ground and kept pestering me to eat better and get more sleep.
It's a strange and artificial thing to teach a class with a tutor and 5 of your peers observing (the 18 trainees were split up into 3 tutor groups of 6 trainees each), but I tried to always remember that this wasn't a gameshow or a simulation, these students were real people, with real lives and real learning needs, and ultimately the least stressful way to deal with the whole course was to remember that it was all about them. The times during my TP when I felt most at ease were when I tuned into a difficulty they were having and a lightbulb went on, and I thought 'Hey I can solve this'. By a fortunate coincidence, one of the main emphases of the teaching was to tell us to take the focus away from the teacher and put it on the students so doing that actually worked in my favour. Also, it helped me to stay calm and feel less of a rabbit in the headlights.
Mutual support from my peer group was another great help on the course. It's sometimes difficult for experts in a subject to really understand the problems that novices face, but we had the support of each other, and we knew exactly what each other were going through. It's a good system (and another similarity with the Lejog I did).
The last week of the course I decided to scrap the Leonardo sleep pattern, and go to bed around 10 pm, but get up again at 4 am, and do 2 hours finishing off before the day ahead. I was definitely more productive early morning than late on. Thankfully TPs 5-8 showed a steady improvement and in each of them I tried to build on the successes and iron out the failure of the ones that had gone before.
There were a couple of 'A-ha' penny drop moments in my last few lessons where I knew that learning was taking place. And it's a wonderful feeling. I had spent what seemed like 14 hours preparing for each 1 hour lesson, and getting a few of those moments made it all worthwhile.
The tutors on the course would often compare CELTA to taking your driving test. All those lessons and maneouvres and 3 point turns and reversing around corners and stuff, but it's only to get a permission to drive. The real learning takes place after.
I've said before that during really intense experiences, we don't have whole happy and unhappy days. We only have moments, and the swing from elation to despair can happen in an instant. Well, I had enough moments of elation on the CELTA to know I want more.
The first weekend of the course, and to celebrate finishing my first assignment I'd been to see the new Terminator movie, and it was Arnie who saved my last lesson too. I'd given the students some famous people to talk about and to one group I gave Arnie and also the Dalai Lama. They had to decide as a group who they looked up to most and he would go through to the final.
Sadly, Arnie lost out and the last 2 minutes of that lesson were taken up with my tutor laughing uncontrollably at my muttered disappointment at his demise. Just as well as by then I had nothing left to pad out the lesson. The laughter that you have to earn, maybe I deserved it by then. I'd worked as hard as I possibly could. I doubt I could have given any more.
For some reason I often see parallels between scenes from my own life and scenes from Action Movies. As well as Arnie, I felt a lot like Neo from the Matrix during CELTA. Grappling to understood this crazy code he's been given to deal with. In my case it was English I was trying to deal with, not the mathematical code of the Matrix, but by the end, I was starting to be able to read the code. Not just the overall language anymore, but I could see the building blocks too. Stative verbs, phonemes, collocations, superlatives, lexical sets, modifiers, tenses. I was starting to see them all.
I'm not sure what the future holds now I've passed the course, Initially, and now that I'm properly equipped, I'd like to go back to St Vincent's, and take my own classes, and put everything I learned on the course into practice.
But whatever I do in life, I now know that for a few hours at least I was an English Teacher. And a proper one at that. Not a pretend one or an impostor any more. And that knowledge is in itself worth a lot. It's nice to have started to believe....
 |
| CELTA! |
 |
| LEJOG! |
I know some people who've done the CELTA before. They told me it was really hard work, and not to expect any sleep, or any free time at weekends, and I took all this with a pinch of salt. I thought it was like the legal warnings at the gates to the Monkey Enclosure at Longleat, which say things like 'Be warned! If you stop, these monkeys will tear your car to pieces' And you think 'Yeah right, they probably have to say that for the insurance'. And then you go in and before you know it, they're making off into the trees with your windscreen wipers and your wing mirror and the handle off your sun roof. With the benefit of hindsight, I'd have to say that, if anything, those people who warned me about CELTA, they played it down.....
 |
| Here is Green Group. All except for Sunny (we couldn't find him). Again North America was strongly represented... |
My journey to the CELTA course every day over the last 4 weeks has reminded me very much of my schooldays. I went to school between 1979 and 1986 less than a mile from Action English. My walk up from the city centre was the same in both cases. My younger self used to walk to school from the centre of Leeds to save the 15p bus money each day, first of all for sweets and then latterly for beer. The daily walk reminded me what temporary creatures we are, as despite the passing of 30 years, much about the walk remains the same, even if my bones are a bit more creaky these days.
Despite LEJOG and CELTA being very different activities, there were certain parallels. Not only the acronyms and the number of participants, and the presence of some North Americans, also some of my routines were the same. As on last year's trip, I got into the habit of eating the same things for lunch every day, to save a bit of thinking time. This year's favourite was cheese and red onion. Also, like last year, the evenings became something of an eating competition, although this year instead of 3 course hotel meals, I called in almost every night to Trinity Kitchen and tried almost every food they have on offer. Indian, Vietnamese, Mexican, Middle Eastern etc, Each day the tea-time blow out on a big takeaway was my reward for surviving the day.
 |
| CELTA is full of mountain top moments. Either you're on top of the mountain, or the mountain is on top of you... |
1) You're not there to be a wise man or a sage, a clown, a show-off or a stand up comedian, You're there to help people learn. If they're not learning, you're not doing your job properly.
2) You're going to get plenty of feedback on your performance, and some of it might be bruising. It's not personal, so don't take it as such. Whatever they say to you, whether you like it or not, take it on the chin and keep going.
But before we taught any lessons ourselves, we had to see how the experts do it.
I've been working for a charity in Leeds called St Vincent's since last October. Mostly being a teaching assistant but I've also done a bit of amateur teaching. After a few months of volunteering I thought my knowledge of the English language was pretty good, but one observed lesson with an expert was enough to reveal whole chasms of missing knowledge. I knew nothing about phonemes and pronunciation and word stress and intonation.
Another thing that stuck with me was my first TP tutor saying that you can have fun in the classroom, but you have to earn the right. I figured out that was mostly going to be by knowing things, and getting something of a handle on phonemes later in the course was one of the parts of the course I enjoyed the most.
 |
| Hasta la vista Phonemic chart!! |
If only I'd had the mental capacity to take it all in. I was writing so fast every day I nearly set fire to my notepad. My brain was so overwhelmed most of the time, the hamster in the wheel of my brain hadn't just died, he'd set on fire and his charred corpse was going round and round the wheel and setting fire to the bedding in the bottom of the cage, which then was becoming a wider fire hazard, which had the potential to burn the whole house down.
 |
| How do I get myself into these scrapes? |
During my volunteering at St Vincent's, even when I've had to take classes myself, I've never felt like a teacher. I always felt like an impostor, someone pretending to be a teacher, but during my TP3, I had a period of around 15 minutes where I actually felt like a teacher. It was like the Matrix subway fight between Neo and Mr Smith. I knew I couldn't beat him yet, but I knew I was good enough to have a go. I was starting to believe....
However, progress can have its ups and downs. My TP4 on Day 10 wasn't such a success. I was so tired by then. I'd been following a sleep pattern advocated by Leonardo da Vinci, which involved going to bed for really short periods of sleep and then getting up again about 3 times a night.
 |
| Here is our basement classroom. Escape routes via both door and window are possible.... |
However, the feedback I got after it was my favourite of the whole course. It was that you can't think outside the box, if you haven't built the box. I've been told before many times that I have a tendency to go off at creative tangents and I often have trouble keeping this in check, but sometimes it's necessary to hold myself back. And so the rest of the course and TPs 5-8 were all about building the box.
 |
Despite the emotional ups and downs on the course, I always tried to keep a sense of perspective, and remember that although it was a course I really, really wanted to pass, it was still only a course. I remembered reading about a female athlete in the Olympics who'd trained for years to perform in a race lasting minutes, and just before her race she calmed herself down by thinking 'It's only the Olympics'. It helped her not to freeze on the day. At times early in the course when I thought I might fail, I reassured myself that even if I fail, the experience wouldn't be wasted. It's only CELTA!
Something else that helped me keep a sense of perspective was thinking about my mum, who died last year. Again, this reminded me that it was only a course, and not life or death. My mum left me a small amount of money when she died, and I spent some of it on doing the course, so even if I'd failed, it would have been her money I was wasting, not my own. It was probably just as well she wasn't around during the course though, she would have only worried that I was running myself into the ground and kept pestering me to eat better and get more sleep.
It's a strange and artificial thing to teach a class with a tutor and 5 of your peers observing (the 18 trainees were split up into 3 tutor groups of 6 trainees each), but I tried to always remember that this wasn't a gameshow or a simulation, these students were real people, with real lives and real learning needs, and ultimately the least stressful way to deal with the whole course was to remember that it was all about them. The times during my TP when I felt most at ease were when I tuned into a difficulty they were having and a lightbulb went on, and I thought 'Hey I can solve this'. By a fortunate coincidence, one of the main emphases of the teaching was to tell us to take the focus away from the teacher and put it on the students so doing that actually worked in my favour. Also, it helped me to stay calm and feel less of a rabbit in the headlights.
 |
| Mutual support. Sometimes it's the only thing that stops your brain melting... |
The last week of the course I decided to scrap the Leonardo sleep pattern, and go to bed around 10 pm, but get up again at 4 am, and do 2 hours finishing off before the day ahead. I was definitely more productive early morning than late on. Thankfully TPs 5-8 showed a steady improvement and in each of them I tried to build on the successes and iron out the failure of the ones that had gone before.
There were a couple of 'A-ha' penny drop moments in my last few lessons where I knew that learning was taking place. And it's a wonderful feeling. I had spent what seemed like 14 hours preparing for each 1 hour lesson, and getting a few of those moments made it all worthwhile.
 |
| Here's a drawing I did during my buddy Zahra's last TP, to try and encourage her to find her inner Super-Hero. I really tried hard to find mine during the course. |
I've said before that during really intense experiences, we don't have whole happy and unhappy days. We only have moments, and the swing from elation to despair can happen in an instant. Well, I had enough moments of elation on the CELTA to know I want more.
The first weekend of the course, and to celebrate finishing my first assignment I'd been to see the new Terminator movie, and it was Arnie who saved my last lesson too. I'd given the students some famous people to talk about and to one group I gave Arnie and also the Dalai Lama. They had to decide as a group who they looked up to most and he would go through to the final.
Sadly, Arnie lost out and the last 2 minutes of that lesson were taken up with my tutor laughing uncontrollably at my muttered disappointment at his demise. Just as well as by then I had nothing left to pad out the lesson. The laughter that you have to earn, maybe I deserved it by then. I'd worked as hard as I possibly could. I doubt I could have given any more.
For some reason I often see parallels between scenes from my own life and scenes from Action Movies. As well as Arnie, I felt a lot like Neo from the Matrix during CELTA. Grappling to understood this crazy code he's been given to deal with. In my case it was English I was trying to deal with, not the mathematical code of the Matrix, but by the end, I was starting to be able to read the code. Not just the overall language anymore, but I could see the building blocks too. Stative verbs, phonemes, collocations, superlatives, lexical sets, modifiers, tenses. I was starting to see them all.
 |
| Come over here and use a stative verb in a continuous tense (if you think you're hard enough)... |
But whatever I do in life, I now know that for a few hours at least I was an English Teacher. And a proper one at that. Not a pretend one or an impostor any more. And that knowledge is in itself worth a lot. It's nice to have started to believe....
