Teaching?

Well, I've made it to the end of the first week of my summer teaching stint ... and now I'm spending the weekend trying to catch up on myself!! As ever, my first week seemed to be largely taken up being incredibly inefficient - rushing around chasing up computer log-ins, missing textbooks and board markers. Although I'm only meant to be teaching three mornings a week plus one full day, somehow the morning's seem to spread across to mid-afternoon and by the time I've sat down and had a cup of tea and sorted out my huge accumulated pile of papers, the day seems to have disappeared and I haven't done any of my 'other work'. I really do need to set aside clear non-teaching blocks this week when I don't get tempted into marking or researching lesson ideas.

The actual teaching has been the relatively easy bit. I've got a nice little class and this year I'm taking over a group who've already done 5 weeks, so they're already 'broken in' and not quite as shell-shocked as the new intake. Even so, I've had the niggling feeling that I haven't really done any proper language teaching yet. Most of the week's been taken up with setting out the ground rules for the end-of-course assessment - lots of academic skills stuff about format and word limits, choosing a topic and writing an outline, using the library and all that preliminary stuff. I'm hoping that next week I'll get onto something a bit more linguistic - I'm itching to get down to some nice juicy grammar rules and the AWL ...