Wow, I've already taught two English lessons to two different intermediate classes and today was only my third day of TEFL class! As you may gather from that, my TEFL course is pretty intense. Like finals week intense, well, maybe an easy finals week at Smith as I'm not quite at the I'm-going-to-burst-out-crying-because-I-dropped-a-piece-of-broccoli-in-the-dining-hall stage. I have class from roughly 10am to 6pm everyday with an hour and a half lunch off. I've taught two 15 minute lessons the past two days with two other TEFL students (each of us did 15 minutes for a total of 45) and Friday I'm teaching a 45 minute lesson on my own, out of a total of 5 such lessons. For each of these lessons, I have to hand in a detailed lesson plan. Additionally, I'm going to be working with a student for one-on-one lessons. For someone with absolutely no experience teaching before this Monday, I've certainly thrown myself into it! My classes thus far have been great and so have the teachers, I can't say I've been bored during class much at all! Much more than I can say for half of my time in high school and college.
Haven't been out much since the course started, so I'm excited for the weekend. I'm currently super overwhelmed as I apparently need to start applying for jobs this week so that I can snag a job and get all the work visa paperwork done before my tourist visa runs out. On top of that, I'm trying to look into flats and figure out whose staying here and where I might want to live. Unfortunately, a lot of people from my class are leaving after the class or not really sure if they'll stay, so who knows who and where I'll end up with!
Anyway, two things I've noticed in Prague so far. One, peeing in public and people letting their small children of either gender pee in public seems to be pretty standard. As I was walking through a park in Prague 2 by myself the other day I saw a mother holding her kid in the AIR with its pants down and noticed a STREAM of pee shooting up in the air to the ground from it. I had to force myself not to stare as to not appear a pedophile, but I was pretty impressed with the projectile pee job going down. Second, fast-food of the food court variety is actually served on real plates with metal cutlery that you return to them in the mall near my flat! None of that throw away styrofoam bullshit. Very trusting of them, I must say, but yay for less waste!
I'm in that oh-shit-I-just-realized-I'm-in-another-country-with-no-real-friends stage right now and am trying to work through it. It's a bit hard as there's only 4 of us (2 in each flat) in the Hotel Pivovar and it seems there's much more people in other housing grouped together so that they get to be more social. Ah well. Mission Friends will begin as soon as I have some goddamn free time!
Sbohem teď!
So the peeing men statue is actually a reflection of the social norm, ey? I would not have called that one!
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