CELTA

Before I back came to Spain, I was excited, but more than anything I was afraid of being in class all day for five days a week. The CELTA course has been every bit as much work as I expected, but I will almost certainly pass.

I arrived on November 2 without incident. I was most worried about the layover in New York City- I noticed just a week before that I was scheduled to fly into La Guardia and out of JFK. I caught the bus to JFK with plenty of time to spare. Even though it was just a layover, it was cool to just be in New York City. Only one thing- I thought the bus driver was going to kill somebody. But when we got onto the freeway, I saw that his too-close-for-comfort driving technique had plenty of company out there. Amazingly, there was a lot of honking, but I didn’t see anyone get hit.

I sat next to an imam on the flight from JFK to Madrid. God has a knack for placing me next to interesting people. It took me a little while to figure out that he was not Spanish, though the fact that he was the only person around speaking English on his cell phone should have been a good clue. We had a good conversation about interfaith dialogue, which he promotes through organizing trips to the Middle East and Europe for students of diverse religious backgrounds. He told me, “The future is not just Muslim or just Christian. The future is interfaith.” Interfaith dialogue is a good thing, but it could lead to relativism. I wanted to ask him if he thought all the major world religions are as true as Islam, but I thought it was best not to go there. I’m pretty sure the honest answer would have been “no.”
I actually kind of felt at home in Madrid. Hearing those Spanish voices and just the overall feel of the Madrid Barajas Airport just gave me an indescribable sense of familiarity that I had forgotten while in Orlando but which returned quickly. Ryanair also brought back memories. I really felt like I was in Europe again when I opened my copy of their complimentary magazine.

I found the right bus at the Palma de Mallorca airport and took it into town. The walk from the bus stop to my flat was much longer than it needed to be because I did not plug the whole address, c/31 de desembre 9, into Google Maps. Most street addresses don’t have a number before the street and after so that confused me. The lady from International House arrived at exactly the moment I set my bag down on the sidewalk in front of the door. I had braced for the worse after reading a document from the school, “Accommodation in Palma is expensive relative to the rest of Spain. However, it is not necessarily of a higher standard. Whilst International House tries to make accommodation as comfortable as possible for CELTA candidates, you should be aware that in Spain it is not necessarily normal to have a lot of space, natural light, central - heating, air-conditioning or total silence at hours we may consider to be quiet times, in your bedroom.” The flat looked very old, but it was much larger, cleaner and in better shape than I expected. I met my flatmates later that afternoon- Madelyn from Sweden, Erica from New York City, and Douglas from England.

The course started two days later. I really wish I had known what I learned here in the first week alone when I taught the English Clubs at UPNA or at the CNAI camp in Lumbier. For example, asking, “Do you understand?” is not the best way to find out if your students really grasped what you just taught them. Also, reading aloud in class (which I’ve done several times as a student and a teacher) is not effective because the students get terrible pronunciation stuck in their heads. There has been a lot of focus on giving brief but clear instructions and achieving specific aims in your lessons. We spend the morning in TP (Teaching Practice- yeah, that cracked me up at first) followed by a feedback session in which we give and receive feedback on the lessons taught that morning. We all had to teach a total of nine lessons, two or three per week. The first lesson was twenty minutes long and the next six were forty minutes. I have to teach one more time on Monday for sixty minutes. I really can’t complain about how it’s turned out. The instructors are excellent, the class only has ten students, and I love my classmates.

Of course I expected a diverse group, but I was still captivated by my classmates. Danielle, who is originally from Illinois but has been bouncing around the world her entire adult life, walked straight to class from a boat that brought her from southern Spain just that morning. Matthew, who showed up in the middle of the first day of class, had come straight from volunteering at an orphanage in Mexico. Erica has worked for the Pew Center and done volunteer work for the Red Cross cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina. She’s been living in Ireland for the past five months. Douglas is from England but has lived in Germany for fourteen years and taught ski lessons. This group reminds me of a documentary I saw a few days before arriving in Palma called Encounters at the End of the World. Part of the film focuses on the people who work at this base in Antarctica. I love how their occupations were labeled: “cook/filmmaker” “forklift driver/philosopher.” Possibly unknown to most of suburbia, there is a subculture of globetrotters who don’t really call one place home. They move from one place to the next to experience a smorgasbord of cultures. I knew coming in that it would be a very secular group as, though they are not as hostile to Christians and Christianity as is widely believed. Nevertheless, I thought it was best to tread likely.

With most of my lessons behind me, I finally don’t feel so crunched. A few times over the past month I’ve felt extremely frustrated so I’ve had to stop and remind myself why I’m doing this. Matthew gave me a pretty good reminder at the end of the second week. When explaining his convictions to one of our classmates, he showed me that I was not the only person in the class living for God. Everybody at the table was floored by how well he knew the Bible. I’ll have that knowledge and experience to draw from someday, but for now I have an hour-long lesson to plan.