The First Week of School

Every class I taught this week got better and better. I finally just accepted that I wasn't going to know what was going on until right before class, and everything just sort of worked itself out.

I'll be teaching M1-M4. Some of my main classes have as many as 30 students, but the extra classes have between 9 and 15. So far I prefer teaching the smaller classes. In the big classes it's almost impossible to keep the student's attention for an hour.

The real problem though is the wide variety of English ability within the same class. For the first day of class in my M3 classes we gave the students an icebreaker assignment. They had to go around the room and get everyone's name and learn a fact about that person. Then they had to write a sentence about each person in the class. In the same class I had the responses "He like blue. She like green. He like red" etc... and "In her free time she plays the piano well."

On Friday I had a second chance with the M4 Reading class that had gone so poorly on Monday. It had been my first class and I had no idea what was going on. I wanted to make a better impression with my students, and I worked really hard on planning out our next meeting. By Friday I had completely over-prepared, and it turned out to be one of my best classes yet.

We were going to read an essay about a girl who studied abroad for a year in India. The textbook lists a few reading response questions, and I modified it and had them write as a warmup assignment. I think I'll do that every week and make it into a sort of daily journal assignment. I had the students write as much as they could in ten minutes about where they would like to live for a year and why. I got some really good responses. My favorite response was about the USA. The student wrote about how much more fun life would be in America. He could eat junk food all day, stay out until midnight, and read comic books in the back of the classroom. Other responses were more serious. I'm not really taking a grade over this assignment since its so subjective, but I'll check for completion and note any major issues I see several students having. It's just going to be a daily completion grade.

I visited my friends in the Prathom office the other day looking for some markers. Their office is much smaller than ours and really cluttered. There are way more teachers crammed in there and they all share one big clump of desks. I like our office much better!

a quiet afternoon in the English office

I spend a lot of time hanging out in the Mathayom English office. We are right next to a teacher's break room where we can get coffee, tea, and fresh cold water. Sometimes they put snacks out for the teachers. Most of the time it's just me, Rachel, Ryan, James (who returned for his third year), and Geoffrey. Suzy comes in on Thursday and Friday and sits at the desk next to Geoffrey. It's really great having another Texan around. Her mother is visiting Bangkok and baked us chocolate cake. There are three Thai teachers who have their desks in the office, and they're all really nice. Sometimes they'll turn on the radio and play music.

We eat a lot here. I'm not usually super hungry at breakfast, especially since I'm never usually ready for fried rice or noodles that early (that's what most of the Thai's eat). I've been having my daily Choco-Drink and holding out for lunch. The lunch is still really delicious, but I have no idea what any of it is or how to prepare it about 90% of the time. I try to follow along and see how the Thai teachers are preparing their food. The desert is always a surprise. Every day it's served over ice and usually consists of coconut milk over something. I rarely know what it is, but I know it's good. Geoffrey has been here over twenty years, and he still doesn't know what a lot of the food is!

rambutan, mangosteen, and one tiny banana

The dining room is laid out in a very specific way. The back of the room is reserved for the lunch buffet, with uniformed staff making sure everything is fresh and topped up. The two tables nearest to the food belong to the head teachers and the English department. The head table is the most important. All the little old ladies who run the school sit together, and they have their own helpings of food served at the table. Whenever you walk past you wai them and duck down a little. Next to them, equidistant to the food is the English table. I don't know if there's any lunchroom hierarchy past the first table, but if there is, Geoffrey has managed to reserve the second spot for us; we sit right next to the head teachers. We have to get our own food, but the staff sets out a plate of fresh fruit for us every day. They usually have these tiny bananas and little green oranges. The weird red spiky fruits are called rambutan. You can sort of twist them apart and the fruit inside pops right out. The purple things are mangosteen. You have to rip into them. The fruit inside is white and juicy, but the skin is a dark purple, and will stain your clothes if you're not really careful.

I've been going to the morning assembly every day. One day they gave a presentation about one of the past kings. On Friday, James (who can speak and read Thai after three years here) jokingly whispered to us that the words on the screen said "really long prayer". He was right!