It’s still difficult to talk about the loss but this song helped me cheer up. There’s a YouTube video at the bottom of this post. Hope you enjoy it. I could not find an HD version of this video which had good sound quality too, so I guess we’ll just have to make do with this version.. the quality’s not too bad though. The song is fantastic. Shot in Xavier’s College, Mumbai, there is a wondrous twist at the end. One would think it’s a typical song where a friend/lover is trying to make his sweetheart smile after they’ve had a tiff. The ending has just the right comical punch. The mystery is revealed when Aditi’s friends organize a mourning. I won’t give away the details but it’s a really cute and comic ending. For all those who don’t understand Hindi, there’s an English translation of the song at the bottom of this post.
Kabhi kabhi Aditi zindagi mein yuhi koi apna lagta hai.
Kabhi kabhi Aditi wo bichhar jaaye to ek sapna lagta hai.
Aise mei koi kaise apne aansu o ko behne se roke?
Aur kaise koi sochle everything’s gonna be ok? Read More →
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!
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For some strange reason, my blog is being visited by more and more people looking for “feminist wallpapers”. This, when I’ve never posted any wallpapers on my blog, ever! And I only have a couple of posts on feminism.. nothing that would bring my blog in the top search results for “feminist wallpapers”. Lol.. Google’s dumb, and it’s making us dumber. Gosh, we need intelligent search engines, and soon.
I tried googling “feminist wallpapers” myself and came up with negligible relevant results. Surprising, isn’t that? Is that because there are no feminists left or no one cares about feminist wallpapers? But then, how does it explain at least 25 hits on my blog everyday just looking for feminist wallpapers?
Among the top 5 Google results for “feminist wallpapers” were the following really ridiculous images:
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This had to be among the most challenging of all the lessons I presented while I was a CELTA trainee. But it was the one lesson that helped me develop a solid understanding of all the tenses. In fact, just last week, when I had to explain the differences between perfect tenses in the present, past, and future to a new student, I was able to do it without once referring to a grammar book. Aaah, score! 
You can download the lesson plan at the bottom of this post.
The differences in the usage of present perfect tense and present perfect continuous tense are so many that it can sometimes be daunting for both the ESL tutor and ESL student. In fact, though native English speakers can almost always use the correct tenses during speech, they often fumble while constructing written sentences using these tenses. A lot of writers try to do without these tenses as much as possible, which really constricts their writing.
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This was among the last of the lessons I presented during the month-long CELTA course. I was the first in my group to teach a writing lesson, so I had had no exposure to these before. And the tutors did an input session on writing lessons the morning of, so my afternoon class could not have benefited much from it
Yet, this was also among the best lessons I presented, if I may say so. I think this was primarily because I relied on my own common sense (rather than resorting to looking for sample plans.. 
) and my experience as a journalist in outlining the basic rules of succint writing. At the very least, the attached lesson plan is a good guide to teaching letter writing.
I decided to teach cover letter writing to my group of upper intermediate ESL students because a lot of them had told me they would soon be applying for jobs. Once I started analyzing the form of the cover letter, I found that it could easily be divided into the same categories as any decent journalistic report/story – who, what, why, where, when, how.
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The last of the four assignments we did during CELTA was a piece of cake. The only horrid part about it was that we had to do it in the last week, when we also had to present our hour-long lesson plan, which had us all in a frenzy! In the midst of all the excitement, the end of the course and all, we also had to deal with the Fart Machine madness.. hahaha. Fernanda, the crazy Brazilian teacher doing the CELTA with us, was intensely fascinated by all things nubile. She bought a fart machine to use on her students back in Americana (near Sao Paolo) but used it in class with us first! hahaha…. I have to admit, it was fuuuuunny, and I was her partner in crime
Anyway, so in the midst of the madness, we had to do this assignment on lessons we’ve learnt during the CELTA. Again, there were all kinds of arbit guidelines we had to follow.. it was intensely stupid, but the only way to ensure my $2500 did not go in vain was to follow the guidelines. Sigh.. bureaucratic paperwork!
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The third assignment we did during CELTA was also fun. We had the choice of doing the assignment on either Reading Skills or Listening Skills. Since we also needed to reproduce the materials for the assignment, everyone obviously chose to do it on Reading Skills. Much easier to just copy, paste text from somewhere than get listening material. I wonder why they even give us a choice.. haha!
We also had the choice of picking reading material straight from the book or choosing an authentic text (text that has actually been published – online or on paper – and not been graded to the reading level of the ESL students). I definitely wanted to an authentic text.. I was bored to death with the awfully boring stuff in the ESL textbooks, and I thought students must find authentic texts more interesting, even though it can be more challenging and may contain words they haven’t come across.
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So here’s the second in the series of CELTA assignments I decided to post on this blog. It almost seems like the number of posts in the CELTA category are going to exceed the total number of other posts in different categories! Shame, considering I started this blog more than two years ago. Stupid internet addiction has overtaken life, sigh.. I barely write anymore, I should I should. Promise to write more beginning next month (am harboring a huge secret inside me that’s just waiting to burst out.. when I can’t hold it in any longer, I’ll write it down here).
Oops, I did it again.. the digressions – I think I would really make a fantastic stream of consciousness writer, considering my stream of consciousness carries me away ever so often. Virginia Woolf, my mai-baap.. he he!
Anyway, so this assignment, the second we had to do during the month-long course, was a hundred times more interesting than the first, which if you’ve seen it, you’d know was dry as a rehab doll This assignment, which our trainers called ‘Focus on the Learner’ was more my style, i.e. journalistic.
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Now I know every CELTA center sets its own assignments for its CELTA trainees but I don’t think they are vastly different from center-to-center. For one, Fernanda, the Brazilian woman who was at St. Giles International in San Fran with us showed us a bunch of assignments that her friend did at the Sao Paolo center, and they weren’t so different.
You can download this assignment with the link below. I haven’t posted it here for two reasons – it’s a really long assignment (like 5 pages in MS Word), and I’m too lazy to post it here!! 
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