TEACHING SEMINARS

Mongolians love seminars. There seems to be countless seminars all the time. I like doing seminars here in Mongolia. Teachers seem to come with a certain expectation that you may not see normally in their everyday character. When it is seminar time though, it is important to have something fun and kinesthetic for a Mongolian audience. If not, they may look at you funny... Having people move works for me…

The Foreign language teacher seminars take place in the city in one of the schools. The local English teachers and soum teachers come to these seminars. Our English seminar was a one in a half-day event, which included all of the Peace Corps TEFL Volunteers and two counterparts whom we facilitated with. The way we divided into to groups was one native speaker worked on two different seminars with one counterpart.

The planning phase for this series of seminars was rather simple for me. My second year TEFL star Alison worked a lot with the English language teachers association of Murun to help smooth the schedule out. Thus, my part in the preparation and planning was to copy the Seminar DVDs and prepare my personal presentation materials. The previous week included me working with my two counterparts. I worked with Odna on our seminar entitled “Listening in the English Classroom” and I worked with Sanaa on “ESL Websites & Computer Basics”. Our planning was very smooth. Sanaa and Odnaa came with so many ideas.

English Olympics followed the seminar days. I truly enjoyed the amount of work that there was to do during this period. I was very happy when this whole period was over too. The Good news…The family whose yard I live in has a 10th grader who has been working really hard. Her English is amazing and she would many times come and make me practice with her, mainly, because I work at the competing school and did not have time during the Olympic rush… However, She won the 11^th Grade Olympics! The first week I met her I said, “you will win this year…”

I am Happy!