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(Fonske - Picture taken by Romain)

Hello everybody!

I hope everything's going well for you. I also want to start by saying that this post won't be very interesting since I can't really talk about the subject we've been given for this month :s. We only had one week at Groep T because we had two weeks of teaching practice and then one week off.

I'm going to try to talk about the subject based on the week we still spent at Groep T. Since we arrived late in the school year at Groep T, it was difficult to socialize and make friends. The students' all know each other and there are already groups and stuff. During the week, we got to meet our new group. The group we're going to be in when following English lessons. We've only had two hours with them. It's a big group and the students come from a little bit everywhere : Spain, Cameroon, Japan, etc. They seem very nice and I'm sure we'll get to know them better once we'll be back at school.

Getting used to my new environment was quite easy. Céline and Romain being there definitely helped a lot. We now know the school, the neighborhood, etc. That was easy for us. I really thought it was going to be way more difficult to get used to a new system, new buildings, new teachers but it ended up ok for me. We still don't know everything perfectly but we feel welcomed and we feel good where we are. I feel like I'm part of this new school and I didn't think that would happen since I hate change.

We still didn't have our correct schedule the week before our teaching practice so we were running a little bit everywhere. We had to call Mr Vandepaer a lot, meet the person taking care of us at Groep T, ask our different teachers,... but we finally managed to get our schedule. We're going to follow a lot of English courses: language and culture, regional issues, world cultures, etc. We also have a few hours in Dutch during the week. Most of the time, we have oral presentations in groups. That's the work we have to do. Get in a group, work on a subject and then present it to the others. It's fun and it "forces" us to meet different people which is good.

After this week at Groep T, we had our two weeks of teaching practice. I was in "Centre Scolaire Dames de Marie" in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode. It was a very difficult teaching practice for me in terms of organisation. We received our schools quite late and I had three mentors but the phone number of only one of them. It's very difficult to work with three mentors because you have to find the right moment to meet them all, you have to work with a lot of different books, you have to adapt yourself to three different personalities and methodologies, etc. It was the first time we didn't have a preparation week. I was very happy when I learnt that we didn't have to get a "feu vert" because I worked so hard and the pressure would have been too heavy. My mentors weren't really happy because we got in touch late and it was "evaluation weeks" at the school. They didn't have a lot of hours to give to me because they needed their hours to evaluate the pupils. I even had to drop one of my mentors because she wasn't able to give me my subjects before Friday and I had to start working.

So the preparation period was extremely difficult but I made it. Once I started my teaching practice, everything went well. The pupils were nice and my mentors were happy with my work. I was still very relieved when those two weeks ended because the stress took its toll on me. I ended up exhausted but extremely happy I managed to do it.

I am now very happy to go back to Groep T and see Céline, Romain and the others again :)

Sarah

Fun at Technopolis :)