End of week one 

We have classes in the morning, where they basically teach us how to teach.  It sounds stranger than it actually is.  Its actually kinda fun sometimes, it brings back a lot of memories of childhood, since he generally starts off class by playing some game or having us do an activity that we could one day use with our students. 

On the second day, he had us do a survey/test thing, kind of like one of those Meyers-Briggs tests they have you do in schools, so that we could measure what kind of learner we are.  All you had to do was rate these statements between 1 and 5, but for some reason, I rated almost everything a 4 or a 5, meaning I ended up scoring pretty high in 7 of the nine areas (excluding the mathematical thinker and the interpersonal learner, two things that I am definitely not).  Whatever.  I guess this means that I can understand students of almost all of the learning types, since I seem to be a little of everything (which totally coincides with my everyday life.  Even when eating dinner, I’d prefer to have smaller helpings of everything rather than one or two parts of the meal in large sections.) 

TEFL-Barcelona seems to veer away from traditional teaching, as most of the time, they just show the traditional classroom’s weaknesses.  Instead, my teachers are trying new or at least different activities and games and such as a way to teach, as opposed to the typical write-the-vocab-on-the-board-and-the-students-will-copy-it thing.  It's interesting, I guess.  We’re encouraged to bring in visuals (pictures and objects), include music and songs and rhymes, play games in class, and other stuff like that—even with adults, which is who we’re teaching right now.  Everyday, we have a few “students” come in and learn from us student teachers. They pay next to nothing (25 euros a month), but mostly, they just want to talk and talk and talk in English.  As far as I can tell from the two classes I’ve taught, all the students are enthusiastic and eager, and they all try really hard, which is more than I can say from most of the students back home!