2020

It’s been quite a year. Sometimes it’s felt like hard going, but there have been a lot of highlights, and that’s what I want to look back on at the end of the year. Here goes…

January

I caught up with a friend who I hadn’t seen for 16 years, then went to the IH AMT conference.

I submitted my assignments for my first NILE MA module in Trainer Development, and got a distinction.

I travelled to the UK for a family christening. That week I managed to meet up with my best friend too (that’s important as it’s the only time I’ve seen her in person this year).

February

My mum’s 60th birthday cake, as made by Amber, my amazing cousin

The following weekend we all got together again for my mum’s 60th. I saw my mum on the morning of her birthday on February 3rd (hope it’s not too much longer before I see her again!)

The aviation museum in Toulouse

I got the train to Toulouse for a few days with a friend, my first time in that part of the world, then carried on to Barcelona for the IH Barcelona conference, where I presented a few ways to tweak speaking activities. The day I arrived I had time to visit Tibidabo for the first time.

I started gardening for the first time, with the aim of making better use of my balcony and perhaps growing something I could eat.

March

We managed to move our school fully online in two days, thanks to the help and support of IH World. I cried more than once at the amazing way that our staff pulled together to make it all happen so smoothly…just one of many times this year I was grateful to be at IH Bydgoszcz and part of the IH family.

I wrote the first post in my series connected to teaching on Zoom, and it’s been by far the most successful post on my blog all year. My blogging generally stepped up a notch at this point, as it felt like there was so much to process – writing about it really does help. Thanks to everyone who’s read and shared these posts this year.

April

I was a bit worried about my birthday, but I needn’t have been. One lovely friend organised a Zoom birthday party for me, and our teachers had a social that evening where we all played games. It was a lovely day in the end.

Our amazing school Director hand-delivered all of the teachers things to help us stay safe during the first lockdown, and a clockwork Easter chick and a traditional Easter biscuit to make us smile too.

I made my first hot cross buns.

I organised games on Zoom for the whole family for Easter.

Two groups of old friends and one group of new friends started to meet regularly on Zoom – I’ve definitely grown closer to all of them this year.

I took part in my first panel discussion, an IATEFL online event about moving teaching online.

May

My baking experiments have continued all year, but these cinnamon whirls were a particular success 🙂

I moved my garden outside and the first flower appeared on a courgette – I was so excited to know I’d grown this!

June

I bought a bike and used it to do a lot of exploration in the forest. I’ve spent more time in the forest over the last six months than I probably did in the 4.5 years before that!

At the end of the month I managed a couple of day trips with my colleagues as Poland opened up again, both to places I’d been wanting to visit for a long time. The first was to Inowroclaw, the site of this fascinating piece of architecture designed to collect salt from the local water.

The second was to Malbork, a castle built by the Teutonic knights, and the largest castle in the world.

July

I did my first online CELTA, and blogged about it with Stephanie Wilbur. It was fascinating comparing our experiences of the course.

I got my first harvest from my little balcony garden – some tiny carrots, beetroot and courgettes.

August

I visited a local beauty spot and saw more butterflies than I’ve ever seen in one place outside a butterfly house. They posed nicely for photos too 🙂

I managed a short holiday to the Polish coast, including a trip on the ‘boat on grass‘ near Elblag…

In Frombork, I saw the grave of Copernicus. This is probably the closest I’ve ever got to having a spiritual moment (I’m not religious at all) – standing so close to a person who moved the world, in a place I know he had lived and worked and stood too. I also fulfilled a lifelong dream: I saw Jupiter and three of its moons, and Saturn and its rings, through a telescope – I’d always wanted to see planets up close.

I had a weekend away in this beautiful place near Bydgoszcz, dancing flamenco and eating amazing food with interesting people who were patient with my Polish 🙂

Most importantly, August was when I met my boyfriend online and we clicked instantly.

September

Our flamenco concert, postponed from June, happened – there were lots of restrictions (rightly!) but we managed to do it. Well done to Dorota, our amazing teacher, for pulling it all together.

We started off our new school year successfully, combining in class and online lessons in case of a second lockdown – it was so good to be in a classroom with students again! Socially-distanced teaching wasn’t too bad either.

My balcony garden was at its peak.

I got to actually meet my boyfriend in person 🙂 My first trip to the UK since February.

October

I managed another quick trip to the UK before lockdowns and restrictions came into force again.

I celebrated my 10th blog-iversary – time flies!

November

Despite my flights being cancelled, I managed to spend a relaxing 5-day holiday apart together with my boyfriend.

I was a plenary speaker for KOTESOL.

December

I had fun joining the TEFL Commute team for an episode of their podcast.

Despite not being able to get on my planned flight to the UK, I managed a relaxed Christmas Day, and have had lots of love and support from family and friends.

Overall

I’ve spent more time outside, learnt to garden done more cooking and baking, spent more time appreciating my flat and balcony, chatted more often to more friends, presented at and attended more conferences, learnt far more about teaching in a far shorter period of time than I ever expected to at this point in my career, and met my amazingly lovely boyfriend. So yes, some things haven’t happened, and I haven’t been able to be in the same place as many people I love (soon, I hope!), but on balance, I have to say it’s been a pretty good year.

What good things have happened for you this year?

Queer as folklore

This is a lesson plan I put together about 18 months ago for a Proficiency group I was working with, so it’s designed for the face-to-face classroom but I think it would work well online too. I wanted to create something we could use as a reading assessment, hence the inclusion of marks for the reading questions. It’s based on selections from an authentic text from the BBC detailing various unusual traditions from England. It’s been sitting on my desktop since then waiting to go on my blog, and in the spirit of preparing for the new year, I present it for your use and enjoyment.

The lesson plan (also in the notes under the first slide when you download it) goes like this:

Lesson plan

Display slide 1

What does the badge mean? And the title of the article?

“There’s nowt so queer as folk” is a saying loosely translated as “there’s nothing as strange as people”. It’s said to emphasise the strange behaviour of people.

In the article, it shows that these English customs are strange (queer) but traditional (folklore)

Do you know any strange English or Polish customs? – quick discussions

Slide 2: look at the pictures. What’s happening? Why? Make predictions. Give them at least 3 minutes to do this to ensure they are actually creative and don’t just give up!

Have the four articles printed out. Gist = match pictures to articles. Look at rest of presentation to check (pictures follow articles)

Reading CA (continuous assessment): Answer the questions on slide 11. (Total = 12 marks) They mark it themselves (switch papers?) by checking answers on slide 12. Collect the answers for Sandy to check and put on computer. [Fast finishers = reread the articles to check answers, then again to see what language you can steal. What tenses do they use? What interesting phrasing could you steal? etc.]

Vocab: choose two words or phrases from each article to add to their word cards. Encourage them to choose things they might use again! Each pair should select, then work with another pair to reselect, then as a class (pyramid discussion). Make sure they use dictionaries (www.oald8.com) when writing out definitions!

Show pictures on slide 13. Tell partner what’s happening in the pictures now that you know from reading. Can you use any of the new vocab?

Slide 14: Work in pairs. Create your own strange tradition. Use the guidelines to help. Afterwards they read each others (gallery) and decide which one they would like to watch as a tourist.

I wonder how many of these traditions still happened in 2020? What unusual traditions exist where you are?

Image from: https://www.yorkshire-stuff.co.uk/products/theres-nowt-so-queer-as-folk-badge

Colour-coding grammar

I had a 25-minute grammar tutorial with a teenage student who struggled with forms of the present simple. this piece of paper was the result of the that. I can’t remember the exact question I started with, but the sentences are from her and my lives, and are variations on the same basic structure, colour-coded as we went along so she could see what the patterns are in the grammar. The yellow was used to show that the auxiliary is the same in both questions and negatives.

Do you use similar techniques to help students to understand grammar?

Adjusting to an online world (IH Journal)

Way back in April 2020, I wrote an article for the spring issue of the IH Journal talking about how we’d shifted IH Bydgoszcz online over the previous few weeks. What with one thing and another, the publication of the journal was delayed and it finally came out a couple of weeks ago. The editor, Chris, asked me to write an update on what had happened by the end of October 2020, and you can find both articles along with many others in issue 48 of the IH Journal. For those who read the second article where I say we’re hoping to get back in to the classroom before Christmas, we still haven’t made it and it looks like it’ll be February at the absolute earliest before we manage it.

I was interested in Claire Parsons’ article about error correction, in which she talks about using the acronym SPLAT to help her decide which errors to focus on with her students.

If you’d like to read more about our move online, there’s a whole series of posts on my blog from March to June, starting here.

The TEFL Commute Podcast

The TEFL Commute Podcast is presented by Shaun Wilden and Lindsay Clandfield and produced by James Taylor. In each episode they take a theme and discuss it for around 30 minutes (apart from their excellent ‘Who’s Zooming Who?’ mini series, where each episode was 10 minutes and packed with useful tips and ideas). It’s a podcast that’s not about language teaching, but the topic always seems to come up, as they say in the tag line.

At the end of each series, they have a round table episode, with a guest joining the three of them to discuss a particular topic. For the end of series 12, I was very happy to be invited to talk about a subject close to my heart: podcasts. Each of us talked about three podcasts we enjoy: one about language, one about teaching, and one ‘anything goes’. You can listen to the episode here, and hopefully find something new to listen to as a result (I know I did!)

Thanks to Shaun, Lindsay and James for having me as a guest on TEFL Commute. I really enjoyed it and hope I’ll be back soon!

Days of the week (come on everybody, sing the days of the week!)

This week I’ve managed to have two engaging and useful lessons with my beginner teens – that doesn’t always happen online!

The first lesson was yes/no questions with ‘be’, which we worked on with a PowerPoint where we moved sentences around to make the questions. After that, the students saw statements which they turned into questions, before asking each other questions in the chatbox and writing short answers.

The beginning of the second lesson repeated the final activity from the previous lesson – I’ve found this to be a very successful pattern with this group as they feel comfortable repeating the same activity again. It meant I could focus on structures they’d had trouble with, like Yes, I’m. No, I not. or pairing the wrong short answer with the question.

But the reason I’m writing the post, and the thing which was the absolute winner for this group of 10-12 students was this song:

I’ve had it in my head for most of the subsequent three days! The students were varyingly super excited and cringing when they first head the song, but even the student who originally put a cushion over his face was bopping away by the end and got really into it. Most of the group knew at least some of the days before we started (I asked each of them), so I played the song, put them into breakout rooms and showed them how to share screen. They had 10 minutes to sing whatever they wanted – either focussing on the days, or the other parts of the song if they already knew the days.

After that, I went through Quizlet Spell in open class, highlighting funky spellings like Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The students then had about 5 minutes to play by themselves. In breakout rooms, they took it in turns to write the days of the week, then came back and had to write all of the days by themselves in the chat. Yep, that was 90 minutes! I’ll find out in two days whether they remember all of the days…