Busy in Toronto!

There will not be much blogging on this trip! I knew that this course was would dominate my days but when you add the commute, it's just nuts. I am in school from 8:30 until 5:30 (or even 6 pm!). 

This is my schedule:

8:30 - 9:00     print out any assignments, lesson plans, photocopy requests and have them in by 9.

9:00 - 12:45   our classes and observations of other teachers

12:45 - 1:45   lunch and a chance to work on our homework

1:45 - 2:30     lesson planning for next day, time with our tutors, tweaking last minute details for today

2:45 - 4:45     we teach English classes, right now we are doing 30 min blocks, later this week it becomes 45 min, an the last week and a half it will be 60 min each. We have 5 student teachers in my group and we rotate turns, 2 hours per day

4:45 - 5:15   (or even till 6) feedback from out tutor on our teaching and suggestions on how to address any problem areas.

Since I am staying with Padma & Ramesh in Whitby, I have to add a commute. It's about an hour and a half in the morning and about 2 hours at night. I take the subway and the GO Train. So I leave the house by 6:50 each day and get back between 7:30 and 8. Each night I have about an hour of homework and this weekend I have done about 7 hours. I'm going to do a bit more so I can get a head start on next week because the lesson planning gets longer each week as they add more elements that we are expected to include. Last week the focus was on classroom management: giving clear instructions; reducing teacher talk; increasing student participation time; and using gestures, the interactive whiteboard and other materials in our lessons.

This coming week we are focusing on the lesson content as well as classroom management. We have to use different approaches depending on the type of lesson (receptive, lexis, grammar, pronunciation, etc.) and we have to complete a lexis analysis on each new vocabulary item we are teaching or a syntax analysis on each grammatical structure we will teach.