Reading
The books for the diploma course have arrived, and what am I doing? After flipping through them, I go online to find lectures the authors have given. For example, I watched Stephen Pinker on Authors@Google talk about why we use swearwords. (This was to promote his book, The Stuff of Thought.) I’m procrastinating the inevitable, […]
Great expectations
I got some great mentoring and advice from Andi White, Evan Frendo (whose professional development group at ELTABB I’ve joined) and Vivienne Arnold, and have decided to take the plunge and do the Trinity Diploma in TESOL. After an initial talk with Duncan Foord, I’ve just had my interview with Nicola Meldrum, and am very […]
Let down
The “professional development” event I was looking forward to has just been cancelled. Such a let down. The trainers needed 15 paying participants. Just 15! MELTA has about 300 members, and non-members were also invited, yet 275 Euros for three days was too much for them. Isn’t that sad? Why won’t freelance English teachers invest […]
Paedagogical tinkering
Tessa Woodward used a beautiful phrase in her plenary talk at IATEFL, “paedagogical tinkering“. What a great phrase! I’m a tinkerer myself (and have blogged about tinkering, too.) But what strikes me about this: She put “tinkering” in the context, not of fooling around and trying stuff out, willy-nilly, but of proper professional development, of […]
Question: Which skill would you like to develop?
http://annehodgson.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/skill.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadThere comes a time when you realize that you’ve been working hard in one direction or area and have become quite good at what you do. Generally it happens in the middle of what my husband Helmut calls “die Schuftphase” (when you’re slaving away at full throttle). So you’re […]
