CELTA course - too difficult?

[Clarity25]

I am a qualified, experienced teacher, native English speaker, with an undergraduate degree and seven years of postgraduate qualifications. I’m thinking of doing the 4-week intensive CELTA course in a different city in the UK this summer but I’m having doubts

• cost
• age - I’m 53
• What if I can’t actually do the course?

I can’t do it online, there are far too many distractions. YABU - of course you can do this YANBU - you are too old and don’t know enough about grammar

Why are you doing it?

I doubt you'd find it too difficult. I didnt

I did the four week intensive course and it was hard but brilliant and very high quality.

The one thing I would counsel is to utterly clear your diary for those four weeks.

The schools will provide a reading list but if you are feeling insecure about your grammar I recommend buying and exploring the Martin Parrott book: Grammar for English Language Teachers.

Remember you will not be required to retain and produce upon demand a comprehensive knowledge of English grammar; you will be preparing, delivering and assessing classes on specific and limited grammar points and you will be expected to understand those inside out but you are preparing them.

It is honestly fascinating!

You will be great and I think you should go for it. It is a lot of work but I think if you are already a teacher you will find it absolutely manageable. Part of the reason I found it so hard was that I wasn't used to standing up Infront of people. It is really interesting and you will learn a lot quickly.

It's a lot of work, but you will be fine. I echo the PP who said to completely clear your diary for those 4 weeks. I was up till midnight, and even 2am one morning, just preparing for lessons that you have to deliver as part of it. Some people struggled and were still prepping the next morning.

I did it over 3 months 18 months ago at 51, so you're not too old. I have heard the one month course is really intense, and you have no time outside of it, which would not have suited me.

If you're an experienced teacher, you will be fine with that side of it. For the grammar side, the 3 we had who were non-native speakers did better in some ways, because they had had to learn English themselves. I have done a lot of foreign language learning, so was in a better position than the other native English trainees for geammar understanding, but CELTA does use some different terms than I was used to. (I liked Teaching Tenses by Rosemary Aitken because of this.) Being a current Welsh learner was very helpful.

I did internally raise an eyebrow at one of my fellow trainees not understanding what was wrong with "he could of done that," but went into an explanation about auxiliary verbs instead. You know the grammar when you use it, you might not know the metalanguage around it and why we use certain word constructions as we do, so if you have at least a basic understanding of the parts of speech before you start, e.g. what an adjective or preposition or conjunction is and what it does, that will help you.

Lots of the books you could use are available online at much cheaper prices than brand new, though quite probably the school you're at will have a library of reference books.

Depending on where you are (university and seaside towns are probably better than where i live,) there might not be many jobs around, and those there are will not be well paid. Round here, it's mostly teaching for asylum seekers rather than language schools. Mind you, the way the USA currently is might mean people want to come here rather than the USA to learn.

Anyway, for financial reasons, I'm back in IT rather than teaching English, but I think about offering 1:1 classes/tutoring every now and then.

I did it when I was about 25
and loved it. I had already done a lot of grammar and phonetics as part of my degree and that was an advantage- some others on the course with less knowledge/experience in linguistics found it harder, but they all passed and enjoyed the process.

A close friend of mine has just done the 4 week course and she's just turned 50. She has two young teenage kids to look after as well. She found it incredibly intense and was often up very late at night. At one point she did think she might buckle under the strain but she came out the other side and is so very glad she did it.

I accidentally voted YANBU! It is absolutely doable for you. You have lots of classroom experience so that will help your confidence but please keep an open mind about classroom management techniques. We had a couple of older people on our course and they kept pushing back on new ideas. The grammar is doable.

I teach university students and need summer work.

I’m in the UK, in a town with a high number of asylum seekers.