Teaching in Timor

Well, I suppose I should really describe teaching in Timor - it is, after all what I do each day.  LELI, the English school where I teach is well-known in Dili.  The locals are hungry for English and companies like ANZ (one of my clients) will pay to have their staff taught. 

Facilities at the school are amazing.  There may not be a functional sewer outside, but inside there are functional internet connections for up to five staff at one time.  A photocopier/print!!!  A guillotine.  A laminator.  A teacher's area.  Numerous classrooms.  Okay we don't have butcher's paper (more on that later).  And the piece de resistance - a bookshelf with catalogued resources.

So far I have taught mainly at the ANZ.  Next week I get more classes - the Immigration and Justice departments; and evening class and an acronym whose letters I can't remember.  The students are wonderful; very respectful and very keen.  Do you want homework?  I asked them the first day.  Yes!!!!  After every lesson!!  And mostly they do it. 

The main challenge withe ANZ was the lack of a blackboard - I teach my classes in the foyer after the bank is closed.  Last week they furnished me with a flip chart.  I suppose they suspected it might last a month - maybe more.   But I'm a teacher that writes.  So often students need to see something and so I wrote . . . and wrote . . . and wrote.  By the end of my three lessons there were a couple of pages left.  I didn't use the WHOLE thing.  This week, I have been furnished with a portable white board - the same size but far more environmentally friendly.  I like to think I've done my part for the planet - for a couple of hours at least.

Most of my classes will be at clients' workplaces, so I will be literally scooting between them - yes I have a scooter . . . but more on that another time.

Jen, a fellow CELTA sufferer and graduate from Melbourne is heading back to Melbourne on Saturday and since I will be taking over her classes, I've been sitting in.  Yesterday, following the students' request for some music, she used Paul Kelly's From St Kilda to Kings Cross in her class. Students find listening quite difficult and the song got played four or five times.  Joses was sitting behind me and by the end of the lesson, he was singing along.

What could be more absolutely poetic than an eager Timorese students singing Paul Kelly on a balmy Dili night.  It's enough to make any Melbournian a touch homesick.