I have been waiting to write this post since the day I presented this lesson. Not because it was a spectacular lesson or even a horrible one, but because presenting it was a lesson in itself. This was the last of all the lessons I taught during the CELTA course at St. Giles International.
One would’ve thought that the month-long somewhat rigorous course would have taught all us CELTAtians enough that we needed to know before we venture out into the world of ESL teaching. umm… apparently not.
Have you ever been in a situation when everything, and I mean Everything, goes against you? You think the heavens have conspired against you and after a series of mishaps/catastrophes, you begin to give up hope in all that is joyous and wonderful in this world. Presenting the last lesson on the last full working day of the CELTA course should have been a thrilling experience. All the ragda was over. No more stressing over lesson plans and assignments, no more rising at unearthly 6 o’clocks, no more late nights, no more no-beer nights!
I should have breezed through the last lesson, after all I’d been doing the act for a month.
But then, the anti-Pulkit forces of the universe came together to wreak havoc in the until-then magical moments of the last CELTA lesson. I was to begin teaching at 2 pm and since it was an hour long lesson, I had been working on my handouts etc. until about 1.30 pm. With just half an hour to go, I thought I would go ahead and print the lesson plan and finally grab some lunch.
I was using Fernanda’s laptop, which, apart from having Windows in Portuguese, was also about the slowest creature I’ve ever tapped my fingers on. Despite the Portuguese, it wasn’t too difficult to do simple things like opening, editing and saving documents, and using the browser (IE 6, omg… AAARGH).
So it struck 1.30 pm, I salvos my Word doc on the Desktop (it’s an old habit of mine.. just go to the Desktop and save everything.. that much easier to find documents that way) and closed it, hoping that closing Word would prompt IE to open quicker. Well, I was right – IE opened quite swiftly and I logged into Gmail. I was going to email the document to myself so I could access it on one of the computers connected to the printer.
I started to attach the lesson plan… searched for it on the Desktop. Whaddya reckon – it wasn’t there!! Well, no trouble. I went into My Recent Documents and thought I’d find it there. But that was not to be! I opened Word again and searched for the tyke in the Recent Documents under File. Voila, it wasn’t there either. I did not panic yet. I hollered out to Fernanda to decipher the Portuguese f****** for me. With brimming confidence in her ability to understand the cryptic lingo of her laptop, she went about looking for it in all the obvious places.. but my beloved ESL Lesson Plan, the last, was nowhere to be found.
The clock was ticking furiously fast. I had no choice but to run up to the tutors’ room and break the awful news to them. I could have taught the lesson without my lesson plan but unfortunately, all my handouts were in the same file as well! I’d lost everything.
The tutors really calmed me down, saying worse come to worse, I could present the lesson the next day. Phew, the beads of sweat that had been balancing precipitously on my throbbing forehead began to flow down my face from sheer relief that this option was available to me. (I would’ve never known relief can make sweat flow.. but I guess in the state I was, the sweat would’ve flowed whatever the tutors had said)
Meanwhile, half my co-CELTAtians had surrounded Fernanda’s laptop and were trying to scrape it in the hope of finding the elusive lesson plan. Nothing seemed to work.
I relaxed. Elena was filling in for me. I could present the lesson tomorrow.
I was just taking a deep breath when I saw the otherwise-usually limp Wilson and daug 
Darin stride purposefully into the classroom, snatch their backpacks and go off in a hurry. I looked around wondering if anyone had noticed their odd behavior. With a minute left for the beginning of the lessons at 2, we were all expected to be seated at the back of the classroom to observe the lesson. If anyone should have appeared frazzled at the moment, it should’ve been me (and I was just about beginning to relax).
Well, I leaned over and asked Fernanda if she knew what was going on with those two and she told me they were going to fill in for me. Gabi, one of our tutors had asked them to prepare a lesson plan within an hour and teach it.
“Hell,” I thought, “I don’t want to make these guys go through the trouble.” But I wasn’t quite sure whether I could recreate my own lesson plan within an hour. Well, I went for it.. plodded away at a different laptop this time, rewrote my entire reading passage and the accompanying handouts. I let the lesson plan be – it would take too much work to do that all over again, and I just didn’t have the luxury of time that afternoon.
In about 45 mins, miraculously, I managed to redo my entire lesson. You bet, it was an achievement. WIth a huge sigh of relief, I went into the computer room and set about printing the reading material and handouts. Cleeeeeeek, cleeeeek, whined the printer. Beep, beep, it announced that it was out of ink!! Shit, jog to the reception, ask the nice lady to attend to the dying printer right away. Done. Feed a wad of paper into the printer and give the Print command. Wheeeeee, the printer hummed, sucking in paper. I held my breath. I didn’t trust my luck anymore. It printed a couple of sheets perfectly, I walked back to my computer, in readiness to head out to the copier machine as soon as the printer had finished its job.
Ah it did. Without a glitch. Things were beginning to fall in place. I walked over to the copier with my 6 or 7 handouts ready to make about 20 copies.. we had a LOT of students that day. Placing the first sheet face down on the glass top, I punched a few buttons before the monstrous machine made the unhealthiest copier sound I’ve ever heard. It began with something that sounded like it’s gonna begin copying but turned into an ugly, loud screech. The monitor furiously blinked and announced that paper had been misfed into the bloody copier.
OMG, race back to the front desk, waaaaaaaail. SOS was here. Quite-a-nice-looking front desk chap offered to help. On the way down the lobby, he asked me how the paper got misfed. Hell, how did I know, I wasn’t the one feeding it. I began to question the presence of a brain behind his chiseled bones. By the time we arrived at the scene du crime, it was clear he had set his eyes on the sophisticated copier for the first time in his life. He looked blankly at me and apologized. Hell, he didn’t waste time in fleeing after seeing the glint in my eyes.
Mercifully, a lady I’d never seen before was passing by. She sensed my distress and quickly fixed the misfed paper problem for me. It was about 3.15 now, and the students had been waiting for their second teacher for the day for about ten minutes (they had a 5 min break at 3, when Elena’s class ended).
I don’t much care how the lesson went. After the ordeal of the day, I was surprised I was able to present anything at all. My students had a good laugh when I told them the catastrophic day I had had. It wasn’t the best lesson I presented but I think it was halfway decent considering what I’d just been through.
You can download this lesson plan at the bottom of this post. It ain’t the best and I think you should go ahead and I’d encourage you to create better handouts, but it worked for me in the desperate time ever. The vocabulary I was teaching that day was all related to cooperation and competition, something that I had googled in various permutations and combinations the day before and come up with naught. So I do hope you find this useful and helpful. Drop me a line if you do 
If you are looking for assignments that CELTA students are required to do during the course, you’ll find them here. If you are still wondering whether you should go for CELTA or one of the many other TEFL/TESOL courses offered, you might find it useful to read why I chose CELTA.
Go ahead and download this fateless lesson plan. I do hope you have fun with it, not the horrid time I had.
