Well, folks, I officially have a job! Sortof - I got 4 hours/week teaching 1:1 to students prepping for Cambridge Exams. I am happy for a few reasons:
1) I HEART 1:1 teaching!;
2) yay! for income - ANY income; and
3) 1:1 teaching allows me to slowly test the teaching waters since I'm nervous as hell for some unexplainable reason (perhaps that it's been about 4 YEARS since I left the teaching world...hmmm).
That said, happiness aside, I am incredibly nervous about teaching Cambridge Exams. I have the teachers' handbook and several coursebooks to peruse tonight as I prepare for my first lesson (tomorrow at 9am - yikes!), but still I'm unofficially concerned b/c the TEFL course didn't really cover exam prep teaching. We talked about it maybe one day out of the whole course. This shouldn't make any difference, especially since tomorrow I'm working with a brand-new (adult) student who's never gone to this school before and who the school thinks is already at a pretty good English level. But still...my heart was pounding even as I walked down to the school to finalize my teaching schedule, it was hard to breathe as I was waiting in the lobby for the DOS to meet with me, and I think I may have dodged eye contact more than 5 times while he and I were talking.
I can't explain where the hell this anxiety is coming from. It's seriously mystifying me. I keep finding myself wishing there were another TEFL teacher that I knew who was just starting out, like me, and in whom I could confide and comiserate. There are, conversely, lots of TEFL teachers all around me in this town who are working full-time or have been at least established in this line of work for several years. It's stupid to compare myself to others in this way and is only increasing my level of anxiety, but I just can't help myself.
I'm sure that after tomorrow, I will be able to breathe a sigh of relief and actually get to celebrate my first official (non-English camp) teaching job since my certification, but at this point I can't think of anything except how the hell I'm going to fill an entire hour with this student tomorrow morning. I have to remember that 4 years ago I was teaching non-native English students to prepare for the GRE in the States, and what that was like (pretty easy, actually). This will be a different kind of teaching - more strategy-based lessons and working on how to anticipate the format and difficulty of the exam components (of which I currently know nothing!). Guess I'd better get to cracking these handbooks, eh?
Wish me luck, loves. I sure as hell feel like I need it.
No comments:
Post a Comment