Day 10a

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Friday. A day for everything to go wrong.

I wake up, shower, eat breakfast, make sandwiches for lunch and start to pack my shoulderbag with everything I'll need for the day. At which point I find I've lost the USB memory stick and the rubrick for assignment 2.

Sigh. So I transfer all the files I need to my "backup memory stick" (mp3 player), make a backup backup onto CDR, and head into central London. Taking the tube train going the wrong way at first.

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Once in the IH library, I photocopy another student's rubrick (which sounds rude for some reason), before finding I needn't have bothered. I then make a series of duplicated cards for the afternoon's lesson - or would have done if the photocopier hadn't suddenly broken down.

However, fear not for there is a second photocopier. All you need to do to make five copies is (a) press "copy", (b) wait for the machinery inside to stop whirring around, (c) open up the machine, (d) search around inside to find your card sheet, (e) work it out from between two rollers and (f) close up the machine again. Oh, and do it five times.

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I've discovered a quiet alleyway in Covent Garden (an area of London with lots of steets called "Something Gardens" and no actual gardens) where I can eat lunch and cogitate in peace. So I go there...and find I fogot to pack my lunch. It's still sitting on the kitchen table in Finsbury Park (which actual does have a park).

So, after paying GBP2 for an astonishingly flavourless "spicy chicken sandwich" which didn't so much satisfy hunger as take up space in the abdomen, I went back to work.

To my relief, the mp3 player worked fine as a memory stick. And then I managed to lose it. Oh the blessed relief of another student finding it for me - I was so pleased I offered to kiss him. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

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In the second half of the afternoon, I got to teach a class of ten students (three of who turned up). Now, there's a very common "shape" of lesson called "Test-Teach-Test", which involves giving the students some task to find out how much they know, then teaching them about the bits they got wrong, and finally giving them another task to see how much they've learned.

The "teach" stage (also called "clarification" by professionals who like misleading terminology) shouldn't last longer than ten minutes, and shouldn't consist mainly of the teacher lecturing.

My task was to teach a dozen vocabulary items related in some way to humour - "to get a joke", "to have the last laugh", "sitcom", "standup comedy" etc. It took over twenty minutes, I spent most of it engaged in vaguely Wittgensteinian analysis...and there was no time for the second test. The worst lesson I've given so far.

A load of other things went tits up (which I think is a very British kind of idiom), but it would take too long to go through them. Anyway, today was also the day for going back to Portsmouth for the weekend.

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