Summer is supposedly a slow time at the language school, but I have as many classes as ever. On Mondays and Wednesdays at noon I'm covering Aubergine's advanced class while he's on vacation (with his new girlfriend Надя, investment banker by day, stripper by night, razor sharp and fascinated by all things American). Mondays and Wednesdays at 7 I teach pre-advanced, a group I've had since I got here. Tuesdays and Thursdays, I teach intermediate at noon and I cover Green Pepper's FCE class at 7. All the weekday classes are two hours and fifteen minutes, with a break in between. My intermediate Saturday class ended last week, so they gave me a conversation class starting this Saturday at 11. Then I have my individual student, Елена, for an hour and a half. That adds up to 22.5 hours per week in the classroom.

The language school has a teacher-training program, where they hire you as an intern for $500 per month, give you three weeks of training, then give you a full course load. I took a different teacher-training class in January (in Krakow), so they considered me a full teacher right away and pay me $800 per month (plus a flat, which the interns get too). The Krakow class gave me a CELTA certificate (Cambridge English something something), which is usually the minimum qualification for getting hired anywhere if you don't have experience.

The CELTA course had a lot of acronyms, terms, flow-chart diagrams, and airy theory (what shape is your lesson?) that I've pretty much forgotten. It also had a lot of really useful nuts-and-bolts-type ideas about running a classroom--when to do things with the whole group and when to put the students in pairs, how to deal with reading and listening texts, what kinds of errors to correct and how to do it, the best order of different activities after you introduce new grammar and want the students to use it, presenting vocabulary in interesting ways. It also helped that the 10 of us taking the course got to see things from a student's perspective. One of the teacher-trainers started a lesson by playing a random excerpt from a scratchy, taped interview with Noam Chomsky and asking us to discuss it. I fell for it hook line and sinker and tried to say something intelligent, but it turned out she was showing us exactly how not to stage a listening task.

The CELTA is great for producing functional, fairly standardized English teachers, but I've found that so much of teaching (or teaching small language classes, perhaps) is reading your students and figuring out what you have in your personality that you can use to communicate all the different aspects of language to them. I was going to write about each of my classes but I'll do that later...it's 1 and I'm tired (and Tyler's calling from Australia tomorrow morning to talk about our trip to Tibet next month).