CELTA comeback!

CELTA - Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults; which today means more to me than a piece of paper. During the month of October, I had the pleasure of taking an intensive one month course at Language Studies Canada (LSC) to get that certificate. But I got more than a certificate. It was the load of information, the opportunity to put it into practice in a real classroom, knowledgeable and hilarious tutors, and a bunch of crazy great people I got to study with. Altogether, it was an awesome experience. I know I learned alot, from our tutors, our students and my peers. I think we spent more time laughing during that whole month than we did anything else, actually.

After spending a month working every day with that eclectic bunch of people, it was hard to say goodbye on the last day. I've kept working with one of our students, Lucie, from France, who comes in usually on Tuesdays from Toronto. It's been an incredible learning opportunity for me. As for my co-students that I learned to really love and appreciate, they're all getting on with life, finding jobs teaching ESL or buying plane tickets to teach or travel overseas.

So, before we all part ways completely, I wanted to invite some of them over to my little home in Oshawa, affectionately known to CELTA as "The Schwa", after the English phoneme... long story. Anyway, last night, they finally came, at least there were 6 of us here, only half of the original group in the end, but it was still a lot of fun. We had great desserts, brought to us by Chris and Marijke, and Jenn brought a yummy Philippino dish, and Felicity a lovely pot of flowers, and Krystina... her lovely self. We played Taboo (one of my all time favorites), and it was just really nice to see all of them again and catch up a bit after having said such a quick hello and goodbye. My how time flies!

The top pic is the shot we took on our last day of class, before all saying goodbye. We're there all mixed in with our great students, who were so patient with us and such a joy to teach!
This one here is the one we took at my home in the Schwa... Did we change much in a month? Can you find us hidden amongst our students up top?



Uhhh, what happened here? I think it was getting late... oh, no, wait, it was actually Brianna's idea...


By the way, if any of you guys from CELTA is reading this, Brianna (my roommate) said she really enjoyed meeting y'all, and you're a really cool bunch (and I agreed).

When it all comes down to it, I'm so grateful to God for setting me up for such an great month. Without going into all the interesting intricate details, it was kinda cool how it all happened. Over a year ago now, at the end of August, I was very confused and was praying and asking God to give me a sense of direction for the year ahead. I'd already been thinking about and looking into taking an ESL course for a few years, but it had just never worked out up till then, wrong timing. So as I took a day to pray and fast and set some goals, I felt that I should really seriously look into finally doing that course. So I searched the internet, only to get discouraged for my lack of qualifications for the courses I was interested in... until I stumbled upon the LSC website. It just seemed like the perfect match. I sent in a registration form, and within weeks, I'd gone to the interview and was accepted into the course for the date I had set: October of the following year... For several practical reasons, that seemed to be the best time to go.

And am I ever happy with how it all turned out! Besides it having been perfect timing lifewise, I also ended up with the best class of peer-students. I couldn't have imagined a better group myself. So all I can say is "Thank you God!"