On August 5th I taught my final hour in both the Conversation Cafe as well as my practicum. This was a week full of lasts as the TESL program came to a close. This week the entire L&C program ended for the students I was teaching too. The Conversation Cafe was hugely successful and gained a lot of positive feedback from the students. It was so positive that it led to a job opportunity continuing in the Conversation Cafe with a new group of students. This will be my first teaching contract after the TESL program. I’m looking forward to meeting more students and running the discussions, it is a bonus that I get to be paid to do it.
In my final Conversation cafe, I intended on having the students present their partner activity front the previous week, but after observing their morning class (which is the time slot right before the Conversation Cafe) I realized they were already doing a lot of presentations with their Pecha Kucha assignment. This realization brought me to the idea of expanding their answers in their interview. I quickly scanned the slides and selected a few answers, one I was happy with and two that could be improved. When I was trying to explain what I wanted to the students I defaulted to my very safe place of teaching Canadian children, so for this task of expanding their sentences I used vocabulary such as “stretching” and “joining”. This type of vocabulary is very effective with grade 2 students but for the students, I was working with I should have used technical terminology like compound sentences.
I have really enjoyed my practicum and this program, I’m sad to see them go. I am looking forward to the next round of teaching English, and I feel lucky I don’t even have to leave the house to do it! In January if you would have asked me what my year would look like, there was no way I would have anticipated it would have shaped up like this. Even though there is a global pandemic I am incredibly happy with the opportunities I’ve been provided during this time. I’m happy to have Tesl, I see more years of me working with TRU teaching English to many more students.