It was the first day of my new course at the Jordan military training school for women. Along with 3 other teachers and one of my managers from the British Council teaching centre, we traveled from Amman to the Army base in a city called Zarqa. It has about 1 million people and is about an hour away.
Paul's class
Blind leading the blind
We left early so that we would not arrive late on the first day, but after a while we realised that our driver was heading for the wrong location on his phone and we were on the wrong side of the city. After obtaining the correct placemark from our office, we ended up arriving 15 minutes late, but no one seemed too concerned.
When we arrived, our first task was to divide up the students into 4 classes. I had been there the previous month to do English level tests, so we knew which classes to put them into. There are 67 women in the course which will last for the next 2 months.
In our first lesson, the main aim was to get to know one another to check that everyone is in the right level by doing lots of different writing and speaking activities. I found out all about their army training programmes and about how some of them manage to fit it around being mothers of small children.
Chasing a cat with a parrot in its mouth
One of my ice-breaker questions was, 'Tell a funny story from your childhood' and the funniest story was, 'When I was a little girl, we had a pet cat and a pet parrot. One day the cat caught the parrot in its mouth and ran out of the house. We all ran after it and the neighbours were all laughing, watching us chase a cat, carrying a parrot, down the road.'
The lesson was two hours and forty five minutes, which is quite a long time for a lesson, but it passed by quickly and we had a lot of fun.
This course was paid for by the Canadian government, as part of its 'Empowering Women' aid programme. It's a really great opportunity for these women, who don't normally get a chance to receive good quality English language education in Jordan.
Blind leading the blind
We left early so that we would not arrive late on the first day, but after a while we realised that our driver was heading for the wrong location on his phone and we were on the wrong side of the city. After obtaining the correct placemark from our office, we ended up arriving 15 minutes late, but no one seemed too concerned.
When we arrived, our first task was to divide up the students into 4 classes. I had been there the previous month to do English level tests, so we knew which classes to put them into. There are 67 women in the course which will last for the next 2 months.
In our first lesson, the main aim was to get to know one another to check that everyone is in the right level by doing lots of different writing and speaking activities. I found out all about their army training programmes and about how some of them manage to fit it around being mothers of small children.
Chasing a cat with a parrot in its mouth
One of my ice-breaker questions was, 'Tell a funny story from your childhood' and the funniest story was, 'When I was a little girl, we had a pet cat and a pet parrot. One day the cat caught the parrot in its mouth and ran out of the house. We all ran after it and the neighbours were all laughing, watching us chase a cat, carrying a parrot, down the road.'
The lesson was two hours and forty five minutes, which is quite a long time for a lesson, but it passed by quickly and we had a lot of fun.
This course was paid for by the Canadian government, as part of its 'Empowering Women' aid programme. It's a really great opportunity for these women, who don't normally get a chance to receive good quality English language education in Jordan.
