""Making Lessons Fun!"

Thursday 8^th March 2012

The next day I had been asked to speak at the 3^rd TESOL conference in Tbilisi and share my experience of “Making Lessons Fun!”  The journey to the conference was yet again part of the excitement.  Marshutka from Kaspi to Station Square, Tbilisi, where the driver would not accept our pre-paid tickets and we had to give him cash, so we paid twice.  Grrrr! and then the plan was taxi to the university.  I had fortunately printed a map from google clearly showing the road the University was in both Georgian and English and so it should have been quite straight-forward to jump in the taxi and get to the conference in time for registration and coffee.  But no, the driver didn’t know where this road was.  School girl error.  Note to self – print another map showing said road in situ of many other roads. Breathe sigh of frustration at this point. 

He goes off for a group consultation with the other taxi drivers none of whom can identify where this street is.  Tbilisi is the size of Upminster (slight exaggeration) but no-one knows where anywhere is.  A girl aged about 16 is dragged into the furore and she says to him and the crowd of helpful taxi drivers “It’s so and so street” reading from the map where the little pink pin is.  Wanting to keep face the taxi driver makes a lot of “Oh of course” noises but doesn’t actually have a clue, as we stop in a road after driving for 20 minutes because he is hopelessly lost.  I find a Georgian on my phone and hand it to him and with fresh hope in our hearts we zoom off at high speed and are dropped outside a building with a sign that says Ilia State University and crucially, 3.

It looked surprisingly dead but the address on our program says 3 to 5 and so we get out, pay 7 lari (should have been 5, in fact take that back – free, but we were too stressed to argue) we go into the building, past security, up in the lift to the 5^th floor and find room 505 only to find that there is a large, padlocked metal gate over the door.  We sense we are in the wrong building.  Out we come again this time looking for a 5 and a sign of life.  Eventually we find it but we had to go through another wrong building, out the back again and into the correct building through the back entrance.  For crying out loud!!!! There is no lift and so we run up 5 floors to our destination.  We were in time for the first speaker but not for coffee. Sigh! Sigh! Sigh! 

Teachers looking excited by my presentation

As I have already more than hinted at, Georgian lessons could never be described as fun and even with the somewhat cheerful MacMillan books they still only raise a slight grimace.  I was told there were going to be between 40 and 70 people at the conference but this was a slight exaggeration or eternal optimism as there were 25 and this included the speakers and organisers!  But it did include some classroom teachers as well as those who train teachers so what the hell! I think they were a little overwhelmed by my energy levels which are in complete contrast to a typical Georgian teacher.  I threw my alien ball with the flashing light at them, exposed them to plastic apples and aubergines and my home made flashcards of life size fruit, vegetables and 68 essential food items including of course, life-sized coloured laminated photos of marmite, Branston pickle and baked  beans.  I talked about how I used them in the classroom and then how the students when they become fully engaged in lessons and are interacting with each other tend to be even noisier than Georgian teachers are accustomed to and so they need different behaviour management techniques.  I talked about rules and expectations and what the consequences were if they didn’t follow the rules (for the students in class ha ha not the people at the conference!)  It went down very well anyway and one of the teachers asked if I would speak at her school to the teachers.