The home stretch

By that, I mean, tomorrow is my last day of class. And my last day teaching as a student teacher. Jeez, this went by fast.

I apologize again (I did already apologize, didn't I?) for the lack of posts as of late. These last two weeks have been a hectic time of hectic-ness as I finished up all my projects and pulled all-nighters to turn them in on time (with a few days of weekend sightseeing and pub crawls thrown in for good measure). 

Today, I turned in my Teaching Practice Log, which was a mammoth collection of all my lesson plans, materials, self-evaluations, peer observations and such. Then, we took a sorta final exam (who got an "A"? That's right, me!).

Tomorrow (today), I have one more assignment to turn in, the materials assignment, which is the most important. This is because Wednesday (tomorrow/two days from now), I have to present this to the moderator from Trinity (the mother school in London) in an interview. I'll get to show off the original materials I created for my classes and explain why they worked so well. 

I'm using two things. The first is a map I drew for the pre-intermediate class where they each had a different route and had to sit back to back and describe their route to a partner using directional terms. The other material had to do with form filling (like on an application) for the upper-intermediate class. I came up with three profiles of characters and they had to fill out forms for them based on the information and extract more information based on their comprehension of the profiles.

These things are interesting to me, but I'm not sure how this will register with any of you non-teachers (Ha! Listen to me! All teachery.)

Anyway, that's my schedule for the next few days. Don't ask me about after that because then I'll get anxious and squirm in my seat and tousle my hair and say "ummm" and "uhhh" a lot.

I have no idea what comes after that, actually. (Imagine that I just took a deep breath after writing this – cuz I did.) We have to be out of our flat by Friday and so I've been in a rush to figure things out.

I've applied to a few places in Prague (and even interviewed at a school last week, fingers crossed because it went pretty well). I even sent my resume to The Prague Post, an English-language newspaper here.

I've also sent resumes to English schools and English-language publications in Paris and Barcelona – the two places I would like to be outside of Prague. I'm looking at flights now to both places and trying to decide if I should go to one/the other/both and for how long to look for jobs.

Prague is great and all (and inexpensive and somewhat familiar), but I want to go somewhere I haven't been. Plus, even though Prague is a big city by my terms, I feel like there's more opportunity in a bigger city like Paris or Barcelona. 

These might seem like cliche pipe dreams, but they aren't. Barcelona is home to a sister school to Oxford TEFL Prague, which may offer some help. Plus the city has a ton of English teaching schools. Paris has a ton as well, but I also have a desire to teach while also learning French. 

The good thing is, if both of those fail, I could always come back to Prague. The Prague Post already said they'd be willing to use me as a freelance writer. So I could do that while teaching. As I say, we'll see.

Dang, this post was way longer than I expected it to be.