First Day: Introductions and Meeting Fellow Exchange Students

So, today is the first day of the workshop that I have been looking forward to attend for about two months now. It's called the Workshop for Youth Leaders in Teaching English( WYLTE) and this is the third year that the workshop is being organized. It is a very selective workshop and that is evident from the fact that out of the total 433 exchange students that applied, only 32 got in. I can't express how delighted and excited I feel to be a participant of such a prestigious workshop. Teaching is my passion and attending this workshop will really help boost my teaching skills and take them to a whole new level.

As you may guess, the day started with flight to DC. I flew from Hadley International Airport which is about 1 and a half hour away from my host town, Brattleboro Vermont. It was not a super long flight but it was tiring. When I reached the airport, I was so excited to see the exchange students from different countries. I approached almost all of them, introduced myself to them and took a lot of selfies with them. After having lunch at the airport, we set out for Embassy Suites, the hotel that we are going to be staying in for the week. There, I met more students who had  arrived either earlier or later than I did. It may come as a shock that all the 32 participants of the Workshop represented 22 countries in total. That's pretty diverse; there are students from Ghana, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ulraine, Bangladesh, South Africa, Pakistan, Russia, Bosnia, Indonesia, Kuwait to name a few. I was extremely delighted to know that there is one other Pakistani participant besides me and that one of the mentors, Moiz Rehan is from Pakistan as well. 

At around supper time, all the students gathered in the hotel for dinner. I had a really fun time with all my friends. We sang songs, took pictures and talked about our experiences. Also, the chicken pizza that I got was delicious and so was the chocolate cake. Perhaps, the most exciting time was when the sessions started. In session 1, we were told the agenda for week and were also introduced to our mentors for the week. The most fun part was the ice-breaker activity. For this activity, we were given a sheet with a list of 34 questions; questions like your favorite pet or gift or food etc. The task was to get responses for those questions from the people in the room. The challenging part was that that one person could do one response and also, the person giving the response had to sign their name on the world map printed at the back of the sheet. This activity really got me going and I got so enthusiatic. After about 10 minutes, we had our winner who had all the 34 reponses in the least amount of time.  After this activity, the students were divided up in 4 groups: the owls, the tigers, the elephants and the crocodiles. Each group went to a different place to discuss a few things about the workshop. I was with the owls so I went with them. Our mentor had us do some more icebeakers which was very fun; for example we had to arrange oursrlves by height and by grandma's name and by our age in a limited time. We were really good at that. During the discussion, we talked about some of the things we really want to take from this workshop and some specific teaching strategies that we have found to be very effective. That was a fun and useful comversation and when we met with all the other geoups, each of the groups shared their goals. It was nice to see such a diversity of opinions. That marked the end of Day 1. There are lots of things coming up in the upcoming days and I am ready to make use of every learning opportunity I have during this week.