When I first arrived at the school nearly two years ago, I was terribly ill-prepared for my classes. The orientation meeting held at Baylor before I left was given by two former teachers, one who had worked at Prathom (primary school) and the other who worked at Wischawship (vocational campus). They had informed us not to worry too much about our lessons in advance because we would have a Thai counterpart in the classroom at all times who would plan the lessons. Our job would be to help with pronunciation and basically act as a work horse when it came to grading, making worksheets, etc. It turns out that this is more or less true at Prathom, but Mathayom is an entirely different story.
I was not prepared for the fact that at Mathayom we were actually going to be "real" teachers. The classes are our own. We do not have a counterpart. We are entirely responsible for keeping our classes on track with our own curriculum. For the first two or three weeks this was a stressful awakening, as I hadn't been prepared for this, but as my confdence as a teacher grew, and as I saw the teachers at Prathom becoming more and more frustrated with the limitations and restrictions of being "assistant teachers", I came to appreciate the freedom that we have at Mathayom to run our classes entirely as we like, particularly our listening/speaking classes. We have pretty much no oversight; as long as we get our grades and exams submitted on time, we can teach these classes however we want.
After the term holiday, we decided to reevaluate our curriculum entirely. We got rid of the textbooks that we had chosen and began to teach more culturally relevant topics. The first quarter was easy because most of our major holidays fell during that time.
In the second quarter, we focused on storytelling with the lower grades, and on current events with our M4 class. The big final project for the semester was to create a newscast about goings-on at the school. Of course, in the interest of fairness, we teachers made our own as an example and had way too much fun doing so. In the end, it kind of turned into a three-minute passive-aggresive newscast about how bad our office computer is (we've been trying to get a new one forever), and we had a blast.
I hope that we can continue to go off-book next year as well. Hopefully the bosses are okay with that. Until we submit our lesson plan comments in a few weeks, I'm not sure they are even aware that we've scrapped the book yet. My plan is to utilize the month of March between mark checks and graduation to write the listening/speaking curriculum for all the grades for next year to make the new teachers' transition to teaching a bit easier for them. After all, I had a book and a teacher's manual for the book when I arrived. They will be coming in with nothing to go on. I really hope that this works out!
Speaking of mark checks... they are by far the most tedious this I do as a teacher. I won't bore you with the details again, just know that it's two days of us teachers checking each other's math to make sure that we calculated the grades correctly. The first day is departmental mark checks, which aren't too bad, because we can correct any mistakes in our office. The next day is school-wide mark checks day, when we meet in the teacher lunchroom and check other department's blue books.
A few weeks ago we had departmental checks, but I had to go out to the travel agent to book my flight home. Feeling guilty about leaving so many blue books for my colleagues to take care of, I offered to take five home with me for the holiday... that Wednesday was Maka Bucha Day, some sort of Buddhist holiday... so there was no school. I took my marks to a coffee shop and tried to get them taken care of as quickly as possible.
Last week, Ryan, James, and I finally got to go out with the Thai teachers to the textbook store to look for new textbooks. We ended up with a pretty ambitious series- it's totally about pronunciation, so it'll be just used as a guide for our class, leaving us with lots of room to incorporate our own cultural lessons and themed topics. It will mean lots more planning and outside work rather than just following the book as we did my first semester, but in the end I think it'll be better for both the students and for us teachers.
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