CELTA: a steep learning curve
For the month of May and some of June I traveled to Cape Town, South Africa to complete a short course in teaching English as a foreign language: CELTA.
CELTA was amazing. I don’t think I have learned so much in such a short time, I was challenged and stretch, learned from some amazing teachers and have a whole set of new skills and knowledge. But it was also one of the hardest things I’ve had to do.
Academically, it’s a full load. Content I imagine would normally be taught over 6 months is condensed into a highly intense month. By day two I was co-teaching students I had never met with trainee teachers I had known for one day. We taught lessons every other day (observed by our trainers and co-trainees) in the morning, had classes in the afternoon, and prep for the next days in the evenings. When we weren’t teaching, we were observing and evaluating the other CELTA trainees. On top of it all we had one assignment due every week that involved reading through different textbooks.
Our days were long. I would arrive in the morning at 7:30am and many days I didn’t leave until 5:45pm, some days staying until 7pm. Cook dinner, eat dinner then stay up until 11pm or 12pm studying and writing lessons before I went to bed too exhausted to do anything else. Depending on how long the teaching classes went, and how long it took you to write a self-evaluation impacted lunch time: sometimes it was 45min, sometimes it was 15min. In between lunch and afternoon classes, we had an hour-long feedback session on the lessons that had been taught before. Good or bad lessons, these sessions were emotionally draining as you evaluated and critiqued lessons that had been taught using content and methods learned a day or two ago. They say that “ignorance is bliss”, and it was true at the beginning of the course. When we first started teaching, we didn’t really know how off point our lessons were, or what we should/could be doing differently and better. As we began to have classes about methods and content, we realised just how much we had to learn, internalise, implement and then demonstrate competence in…all in 4 weeks!
Needless to say, it is not for the faint of heart or weak in conviction that this is what you want to be doing!
The academic side of it was just one of the challenges of CELTA. The other side was a personal one: it challenged my character. I had heard that coming into CELTA with teaching experience can make it harder as you must unlearn things that you have been doing instinctively for years before you can learn new things. Teaching English as a foreign language is totally different to general primary or secondary teaching. And so, it challenged my pride. Having moments where I felt like I was a lousy teacher. That I couldn’t do it. All the things I thought I was doing right, didn’t work in this context. I had many ‘weaknesses’ and ‘action points’ on my lesson evaluations. It took a lot of humbling and realising that I didn’t have it all, and then work up from there. It also tested my character in how selfish I wanted to be. For one month, CELTA is all consuming. It’s very easy to get lost in the CELTA world and forget that there is a real world out there. That my students, co-teachers and trainers were all real people with real feelings and souls. As the workload increased, it was tempting to retreat into myself, do what I needed to do to get through and ignore everyone else. But I didn’t want to do that. When people asked for help, I had to make a conscious decision not to be selfish. I had to consciously choose to talk to my students after class, sacrificing my lunch time. Cooking dinner, doing dishes and washing for my housemates, checking-in with my trainers after they had had an emotional weekend. It was a daily challenge, and then a daily choice to think of others, to put myself last and trust that God would get me through it. I would like to say that I managed that all the time, but honestly, there were moments I took the selfish route.
By week three all trainee teachers were so physically tired, and emotionally and mentally stretched that it started coming out in tears. Sometimes you didn’t even know why you were crying. You just were.
But we did it. We wanted it. We worked together. We had amazing trainers that were experts in their fields, experienced and 100% behind us. Cambridge has high standards, but we rose to them and passed. And I think I am a better teacher for it.
