January 7th, 2020 

Good morning, everybody,
How is it going? We have only just begun the year 2020 and I’m already looking towards 2021 (when I should be done with my program and maybe I can finally have my teaching license and my teaching diploma!)!

Anyways, it is the first week of classes, and already, I am overwhelmed by the amount of work for each classes this semester: TESL427, TESL351 and TESL415 (and then, eventually, TESL467). As this is my first post from this “era” of my academic career, I wanted to share with you a couple of “anecdotes” and a few recommendations that I haven’t done yet.

Facts which I would like you to know before starting this semester but you can totally skip if you already know or if you don’t care at all

The first semester for your first internship, everything is done, the classes are supposed to be done [I mean, they’re not, TESL 426 still has some assignments, like the storybook assignment, for example]. In that way, you as a Student-Teacher can focus on the TESL 466 assignment requirements, and also… I mean… actually enjoy your time, right?

Well during this semester, which, as mentioned before, combines four courses which are TESL 427, TESL 351, TESL 467 and TESL 415, we have an intensive few weeks of TESL 427 and TESL 351 and weeks of TESL 415. Why is TESL 415 not even intensive? Well, it’s because once your internship (TESL 467) starts, you will still have to go through TESL 415 classes in which the professor is “understanding” of you being in your internship, but still removes 2% out of your attendance for tardiness.

Yes.

Yes.

I know. It means that one day per week during your internship during which you are gonna be stressed out about meeting the requirements and everything, you will have to travel from wherever you are (south shore or north shore included) to school, arrive at around or before 6pm, because that’s when classes start. The course finishes at 8h15pm, and you travel back to wherever you live in order to go sleep or prepare for the next day of the internship, in the morning.

OTL.

My Recommendations

Everything moves very fast in this intensive semester.

So, in order to understand the readings better or to better situate what the professor is reading through the class, I recommend these links. I’m not sure if there are any other but for now, this is what I’m using so far and I’m very thankful that I found these…!

• The Documentaries series about the story of English which you can probably also find on YouTube. You might have to fill in a video worksheet about it, so don’t be too
• Kevin Stroud has an amazing Podcast called the History of English Podcast (which you can find on Google Podcast, Google Play, and a lot of podcatchers), and you know what?
  • It’s really amazing. I love listening to that series and for this class, I’ve started to listen to it again. Thanks to many of the classes I’ve taken, I feel like I understand so much more about what he’s saying, hahaha.

All right,
I hope everything goes well for your semester.
By the time you’ll have received this, I think that I may already have finished?
So don’t worry about me, I might have survived and you’ll know if you see more posts from me in the later months! See you next time!
If you have more
PV