My Reflections of TESOL France, Part 1
Well, when I sat down to write my reflections on TESOL France which was a huge success, I focused on faces rather than the sessions I attended.
I saw the faces of teachers who arrived from the different corners of the world to update their skills, to learn more or to share what they’ve already known.
I saw the faces of teachers…
Those were the ones who crave for making a difference in their schools, classes…
Those were the ones experienced or unexperienced, young or old, with a guarantee of a contract or the worry of where they will end up next year.
Those were the ones who didn’t care about the cold weather or the distance…
Those were the ones most probably who won’t be praised because they have spent their weekend talking about their classes or techniques they have been using.
This is a post to pay tribute to them.
I know there are loads of teachers who complain about their classes, students.They complain about the unmotivated but they never try to motivate.
There are teachers who just do what their coursebook tell them to do. Nothing less, nothing more…
Yet there are those faces I saw at the conference with great enthusiasm still in search for a better way to reach their students.
I am glad that they exist.
BTW, soon I’ll write about my reflections of the sessions I attended and give a brief summary of what I did there 🙂
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Lovely introduction to your experience of TESOL France and what it meant to you, Eva. I find myself echoing much of what you say. It really was a pleasure to meet you and I look forward to reading your reflections =)
Mike
Hi Eva!
What a beautiful post.
It was so great to meet you in person, to see the enthusiastic teacher we all admire on Twitter – and to hug you!
I hope to see you again soon. It was a great pleasure talking to you and listening to your opinions.
Kindest regards,
Vicky
I just can’t get over actually meeting you and all the others! I was saying to my collegue yesterday that some people say twitter is a virtual staffroom, but there’s definitely one way it’s better than the staffroom – it’s free from the hassle with admin, which so frequently clutters up OUR real staffroom 😉
This is very nice. Thank you for sharing.
Just a question for you:
I attended your talk on Sunday and I was wondering if you could tell me the name of the movie used so I could try to find
the scene to do your activity. I think it’s a fun idea, but when I tried to randomly find a suitable movie scene all I found
were violent or sexual scenes. I did eventually try it with a scene from a sci-fiction type movie, but I think the one you
used would be much better.
Thank you!
Hi
Thanks for dropping by. It was not from a real movie, just choose any piece of music and tell them to imagine that it’s from a movie and ask them to describe the scene and the characters. But if you want to do something with the movies still you can go to this blog http://moviesegmentstoassessgrammargoals.blogspot.com/ choose a suitable clip. Before watching the clip you can play the soundtrack and make them guess about that movie.
Sorry, I’m referring to your “What’s the story?” activity.
Thank you so much for this lovely post! We were thrilled to have so many teachers from so many countries this year (24). And you’re right, it’s the teachers that make conferences special. I was also thrilled to be able to meet the PLN in person. Just hope that the next time I won’t be running around like a headless chicken so that we ALL can meet in the bar across the street from the Saint Charles Hotel (or the equivalent in Brighton).
Merci beaucoup et a tres bientot!
Bethany
Thank you, Eva!