I return to where it all began: Prague, the start of my teaching career

This is Dennis, a fellow CELTA trainee. This should give you some idea of what kind of month it was.

This is an adapted version of chapter 9 from A Classroom in Kyiv, ‘The CELTA: the Most Fun I Never Want to Have Again’, along with snippets from the Preface. In the book, I talk about how terrible I was at teaching, especially with how much I struggled trying to teach vocabulary, at one point running around the classroom like a maniac in a vain attempt to explain brave. Here, I get a bit more personal and nostalgic and share a story about a baseball team trip to what was then Czechoslovakia in 1992.

(To clarify: the CELTA is the Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults and is usually the minimum requirement to teach English as a foreign language in any reputable language school. It’s either a more intensive four-week course, as I did it, or a part-time course extending a bit longer.)

April 2005, the CELTA: I decided to do it in Prague, for various reasons. I was living in Belfast at the time and was looking to do it somewhere else in Europe, somewhere cheap, and somewhere where I could experience a bit of adventure. You could say I was pretty naïve.

I had heard from a few people about how demanding, challenging and time-consuming the CELTA was. People told me I would work harder than I ever had before in those four weeks. I figured, “Okay, sure, but how bad can it be, right? I mean, I speak English after all…”

It was a battle indeed. But not for the reasons I had expected.

Some of my readers have probably got a CELTA (and/or teach). There might be some people reading who are considering doing one. In and of itself, it shouldn’t be so difficult or strenuous…as long as you take it seriously and dedicate the time to doing it properly.

Therein lay the problem.

I blame the delights and temptations of Prague. If you’re going to do a CELTA, and you’re serious about dedicating the necessary time to doing it conscientiously, do it close to home, or somewhere where temptation won’t get the better of you.

I arrived in Prague on an early Saturday morning at the start of April. Spring has never been my favourite season, but my arrival on a sunny and glorious day was only the start of a magical month of mayhem, full of splendid sunshine with only the occasional bit of rain. Flowers were blooming, birds were chirping, and Prague was in great, sparkling spirits.

There were nine of us, a nice blend of nationalities: from the US, the UK, Wales, Ireland, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand. We all got on like a house on fire and there were a few of us who were all far more excited about being in Prague than in doing the CELTA.

Prague is a dangerous place to be a conscientious, hard-working student. We wasted no time in checking out the delights, often fooling ourselves into thinking we would do some ‘lesson planning’ and ‘assignment writing’ at a pub. Many a night we’d head out, teaching materials in hand, to sit down and brainstorm some ideas. With beer half the price of water and coffee, that was the obvious drink of choice to fuel our creativity. The trouble is, we never got much done. Plans concocted after seven hours of drinking rarely seemed sensible in the light of dawn. Conversations started at 8pm would come to a drunken conclusion at 3am as we were kicked out of the pub. We reported back to the school at 9am where it would be a mad scramble to furiously write up a better lesson plan and somehow teach a lesson in our delicate conditions.

Native speakers like me get to the CELTA and tell ourselves that teaching English will be a breeze. How hard can it be to explain a few words? As for grammar? My grammar was good, I thought, that would be easy enough. Right? Right?¹

WRONG.

It was a struggle inside and outside the classroom.

Day after day, the cycle never stopped, almost like a washing machine: rinse, soak, wash, spin, repeat. It was tortuous, but tremendous fun. I did, however, pay the price when I got ill during my last week, even getting a nosebleed during my final observed lesson. By the end of that week, I could barely breathe or speak, I was feeling so rough.

But that didn’t stop us from having an epic night out to celebrate, and it pains me to say that I can barely remember a thing. Here’s another picture of Dennis from that night out. Don’t ask me what we were doing here (though the picture is self-explanatory). It was most likely quite late (or early, depending on your perspective).

But oh, was it all worth it. Great friendships were formed, fleeting romances were had, indelible memories etched forever into our heads and hearts. I even got to re-connect with an old friend from many years before: back in the early 90s in high school, whilst living in Germany, my baseball team travelled to what-was-then Czechoslovakia, to a small town close to the Polish border called Vrchlabi, where we took part in a tournament featuring teams from russia, Poland, Italy, the US and [the former] Czechoslovakia. Strangely, and I swear to you, my dear readers, that I am speaking the absolute truth here and not just whitewashing the past, but I have zero recollection of any of those russian kids. None. I don’t think we talked to them, interacted with them…it’s just a blank in my mind. For all I know, they never even existed. My teammates and I loved the Polish players, they were such characters, though none of them spoke a word of English.

We stayed with host families, and all of us were terrified to be separated from our friends and unable to communicate – none of my host family spoke a word of English so there was a lot of sitting round the dinner table passing a phrase book back and forth, trying to work out what the hell I was eating. For many years after this encounter, Veronika, who was my age, and I would exchange letters. She always wrote in English, with the aid of her dictionary, and for a while I attempted to write in Czech, a tedious, painstaking affair. I eventually gave up and just wrote in English – after all, Veronika was trying to learn the language.

And there I was, some 13 years later, meeting up with my old friend Veronika, who was now living in Prague, speaking excellent English, reminiscing on old times. The first time we met after all those years apart was halfway through my CELTA course, when I took a weekend break. After an epic night out that lasted until dawn – do you detect a pattern? – I went straight to the bus station and took a lengthy journey out to Vrchlabi to see Veronika and her family for the first time since I was 14. I was a total wreck. I could barely stay awake, I reeked of booze and as luck would have it, it was a giant, extended family reunion. She had various relatives in town, and we stayed at a lovely countryside lodge where there were endless amounts of delicious food and Becherovka in full flow. I don’t recall anyone speaking a word of English, and I struggled to stay awake and be social. I can only imagine Veronika and her family thinking, “What the hell happened to this bozo? What happened to that shy, sweet, innocent 14-year-old?”

Luckily in future get-togethers I was more coherent and livelier (and sober). During the CELTA on an evening out, she introduced me to her friend Radka, who didn’t speak English at all, and she and I soon attempted to get on friendly terms with the use of a dictionary passed back and forth, and drawings on napkins. That fledgling romance didn’t go very far.

As the saying goes, all good things come to an end and at the beginning of May, it was time to say goodbye to my new CELTA friends, as we all embarked on the start of our newfound English-teaching adventures.

And now here we are, 19 years later, August 2024, as I make a return to Prague, where my career began (a ‘career’, I should remind or inform you, that was only meant to be for two years). It’s not my first time returning to Prague, I’ve made a couple of other trips, but this one feels a bit more special, coming as it does as part of my book tour for a book I never thought I’d write. I’ll be meeting up with Veronika again (and maybe this time I might even ask her about Radka).

This is Pavel, one of my CELTA students, and a popular character with all the teachers. This is dinner, early in our final night celebrations, before things got way out of hand.

1. There is a lengthy chapter in my book on native v non-native teachers of English (and how I dislike the label ‘native speaker’).