What was never going to work? Blogging, running a business and teaching full time together, that's what! 

After not having taught full time for so long I guess one of the things I forgot about was how teaching, especially EAP, and the preparation involved, are ever expanding, time-consuming activities. 

And on a course such as a Pre-sessional, where students are expected to learn how to write fully referenced essays and give academic presentations in 5 weeks, the hour glass of time permanently feels like it is sitting next to you, the sound of each passing grain becoming louder as you frantically plan and mark long into the night, in a desperate bid to transform your students into academic dynamos.

So, on to those questions I set myself in my last post. I would like to explore each question in a bit of detail over the new few posts in order to reflect on the Pre-sessional experience properly and attempt to reach some conclusions.

In answer to number 1 (Have I still got the old magic?) I suppose the only logical and truthful conclusion is yes, but I'm rusty. 

I felt that I was able to gain the students' confidence in my ability to teach EAP fairly quickly, which ensured that they were willing participants in class. However, I also wondered how far I could attribute this to my experience as an (intermittent) teacher and course leader in another university for the last 3 years. I have built up a wide understanding of the issues surrounding international students performance and success and therefore I felt confident that I could answer the students'questions comprehensively. 

Anyway, moving on, I did spend a lot of time planning during the course. I found that the perennial complaint of teachers regarding the lack of suitable material to be borne out. I suppose that this could be due to my lack of teaching experience in recent years, nevertheless this remained a constant worry for me. "What can I use for noun phrases with this class, where can I find a good example of a tourism essay with clear voice for my students, will these students be able to do these exercises?" All these questions plagued me during the course as I attempted to maintain consistency of level and delivery in my classes, while furiously typing my own worksheets and adapting those from previous courses.

Interestingly, I found that the PPP approach seemed to work well due to the time constraints. It quickly became clear that any kind of guided discovery was not going to cover all the material necessary to complete the assessments in time. And the students seemed to respond well to this approach too, maybe as a result of its simplicity, maybe out of habit. So, we settled in to a familiar pattern of me explaining something, showing how it fitted into an under or postgraduate course, a session of scaffolded study followed by a production activity. Now, I was in full swing(!) and started to relax more. The downside: marking and feedback. While this approach worked well in terms of my teaching and planning, the students' learning was more problematic since each piece of work they produced threw up persistent errors and misunderstandings which needed to be addressed the next day. This, of course, took up more of our precious time and plunged me back into the worry pit of time and planning as Thursday's and Friday's lesson plans began to slide over the weekend into Monday and Tuesday.

But it was not all doom and gloom. Using models worked brilliantly, as did including a range of more EFL style interactive tasks and we often had, dare I say it, "fun" in class as students got to know each other and I felt the "flow" returning. Our class rule of honesty at all times was a great galvanising and cohering factor and in the end progress was made by everyone, myself being no exception.

At the end of the 5 weeks I felt reborn as a teacher (with a little bit of the old magic). And shattered!