Daedalian Adventures

The road ahead is rarely straight…

By Lynelle Barrett

Hundreds of Bugs and Ten Thousand Screws,

but Only One Truth

This summer I took the plunge and left Holland to study for a month in Brno, Czech Republic. I arrived on a Sunday afternoon in July. I didn’t come up for air until four weeks later.

The Cambridge CELTA course (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults) was four weeks of intensive study.  And they weren't kidding about it being intensive. There were workshops in the morning and in the afternoon. The workshops included topics like classroom management, writing lesson plans, teaching vocabulary, phonology and functional language. There were also grammar classes for modals, conditionals and narrative tenses, just to name a few. Some activities gave us perspective on how difficult it can be to learn a new language. We had a vocabulary lesson in Lithuanian.

We practiced writing in a language that did not use the Latin alphabet (Elvish Script, Quenya Mode, from The Lord of the Rings).

Then we taught English to Czech students every evening for 2 1/4 hours. Our trainers observed us and made notes on everything we said and did. At night and on weekends, we worked on our lesson plans and wrote four research papers. There was no time for anything else. I lived on fast food during the day and dinner was usually something that could be eaten right out of the package. For one month, there was no life beyond CELTA.

There were 11 of us in my training group: five from England, four from Czech Republic, one from Israel and one American (that would be me). We became a sort of family. We supported each other through lesson critiques, teaching grammar to students who might understand better than we did, and sleepless nights of research. When one of my fellow trainees celebrated his birthday with drinks in a pub, we sang “Happy Birthday” to him in all the languages we knew… English, Czech, Dutch, Lithuanian, Hungarian and Chinese. We shared our triumphs and failures.

Halfway through the course, with a research paper due the next day, the screen on my laptop computer went black. I discovered that I could see the words if put my desk lamp very close to the screen. It was a hot summer night and the windows to my dorm room were open. The light attracted hundreds of bugs into the room. They covered the ceiling and upper corners of the room. They buzzed around my head and bright green bugs nested in my hair. After an hour or so of this, I couldn’t take it anymore. I turned out the light and went to bed. But I could still hear the buzzing overhead and little thumps as big black beetles dropped on the bed (followed by the tickle of their little legs). Freaked out and desperate for sleep, I took my pillow and slept on the bathroom floor.

But even with all the work, sleepless nights and bugs, it was a very rewarding experience. Our students were great. The hardest part was learning all their Czech names. The best part was how involved the class got in group discussions. One lesson had a story about a man who broke into a car using a screwdriver. The class discussed which would be better, to send him to jail or sentence him to community service. By far, the best punishment was to sentence him to tighten 10,000 screws! In a class discussion about lies, a student asked whether truth was singular or plural. The youngest student in the class confidently stated, “There is only one truth.” Then she whispered under her breath, “Or, at least, there should be.” I wonder if she would say the same thing 20 years from now.

I learned one final lesson on the last day of the course. The grade for the certificate was supposed to be cumulative, so I was surprised to hear on the second to last day that we were having a final exam. I got up early and reviewed my binder full of notes and handouts. I needn’t have worried though. The final exam had questions like this:

“What food can you order in Lithuanian (without pointing at it)?”

“What are subordinate clauses?” (Answer: Santa’s Helpers.)

“Betty bought 2 pairs of shoes during the course, what colors were they?”

The most important lesson is to never lose your sense of humor. And that’s the truth.

Lynelle Barrett lives in The Netherlands, where she was just offered a position teaching Business English. Check out photos and notes of her adventures on her website at: http://lynelleinholland.spaces.live.com