Hi guys and girls,
Thanks so much for all your support and well wishes. Really appreciate it.
Okay, so today was my first day of college, and I have to say it was quiet fun.
Starting off, we had to do that creeping death exercise ( you know when you have to introduce yourself and say one interesting thing about you). Yikes, I couldn't think of anything interesting. I was going to talk about Islamica, but I thought others might think it to seem a bit loserish
so I just mumbled something about liking snooker. When I heard other people's interesting things like working for charity, scuba diving, and performing in TV shows, I was like "oh wow, mine was sooo interesting... NOT!" But the teacher said it was okay, and I was brave because I agreed to go first.
Then we got a crash course in how to use the IT stuff, and the LAN and all that. I understood it had to be done, so that everyone was up to speed, but I found that bit a tad slow and boring because it was pretty basic.
Then we broke for lunch - we only got half an hour! (barely enough time to run to Cafe Nero, and order a panini and get them to toast it)
We had a health and safety session straight after lunch which was quite fun and lighthearted given the supposed blandness of the topic. The teacher had a PowerPoint slideshow of photos from around the world, of dire health and safety problems, and we had a discussion about each one. That was a laugh. (there was one of a chinese guy holding up the target at a shooting range!! lol.
In the afternoon, one of the exercises we had to do, was the Squashed Spider. Basically, you have a piece of paper with a spider diagram (it looked like a squashed spider), and we had to write our names, and job titles on the middle, and then each of the eight branches we had to write why we wanted to go into teaching. It was a fun exercise, and encouraged us to see the similar reasons people had chosen to go into teaching, and some different ones too, to think about.
We had a Q&A session aswell which was interesting. Oh and I almost forgot. We, or rather I, was thrown into the deep-end straight away. We were split into groups and had a big piece of paper and some markers, and each group had to come up with ideas on a particular topic. Then, one person from our group had to take the paper, stick it to the board and give a talk to the rest of the class about it. Was a little nervous at first, but I got into it after a minute or two. And everyone clapped afterwards... which was nice.
Today was only the introductory stuff, but I can see this course will be quite intensive. The good thing is, the teachers seem really nice, and we have a good class - it looks like they've chosen everyone from really different backgrounds, so it really adds to the flavour and experience everyone brings to the sessions.
Anyway, that's my update for today!
