Week 2

Our second week is not over yet but there is already so much to say!

As soon as I read our week tasks and discussions, I tend to feel overwhelmed and wonder how I am going to do all this. After a while, all becomes clearer and clearer as I plan my week and manage priorities.

I started off with readings and concentrated basically on the web searching links and discussion. I was flabbergasted by this link - what a gold mine of resources, of search engines I had never heard of. Though (voluntarily) time consuming, it has been very enriching and once bookmarked, we can always come back to it. Not that I’m dismissing Google – no way! But at least we now know there are alternatives and very good ones indeed, suited to our own needs, narrowing our searches and therefore the time we may spend online searching.

I took longer for the remaining activities and tasks and most of the weeks it will be so. I try to do as much as possible on Mondays, but on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, I have such a busy schedule that I spend the whole days at school. Whenever I can, I’ll try to butt in, but I’ll definitely be more productive on Mondays and then again from Thursdays nights onwards.

I loved (re)reading Bloom’s Taxonomy – now the revised one – once I had studied it as a trainee teacher. Feeling familiar (again) with Bloom’s Taxonomy and the ABCD objectives, of all we had this week, I would say that writing measurable learning objectives as precise as Donna expected, was the most difficult part.

Describing a class was Project Task #1 and it wasn’t as simple as it seemed at first sight and again it took me longer than I expected as there was so much to say. Interesting were also the inevitable comparisons - school systems, facilities (or lack of them), number of classes / hours allocated to English or even the number of students per class. 

For the last fortnight that I’ve been feeling energized. Teacher training courses always spark lights but this one has made me rethink, revise and update much of what I have long taken for granted after over twenty years of teaching. And there is something else. No matter how diverse our origins, how diverse we all are, something unites us all: our eagerness to learn and participate, and (y)our selfless generosity in sharing!

Bless you all. Thank you,

Alex