Amy (and Monica) Take Thailand: Week 6

      After returning from an eventful visit with Monica it was back to teaching -- which was still a pretty new thing at this point.

     The week starts on Wednesday and it could be considered my real first teaching day since it's the first day my lesson plan isn't "Play 'Introduce Myself' for a bunch of Thai kids." It's a decent day. Nothing too remarkable (as I write this a month after the fact, the initial hilarious things start to fall out of focus ... oops.)

No one seemed to care that this dog is destroying a pigeon while the assembly is going on.

This is what the lower grade students wear on Wednesdays or Thursdays.

It's their scouts uniform!

These are some trees by one of my old classrooms.

     Thursday and Friday I'm back to the introduction game. I'm meeting coworkers and doing my best to make work friends.

     Saturday rolls around and it's another teaching day!! Wooooooo!!! Wait .... what?!

     Of course I knew this was going to happen. This is the price I (and my school) pays for getting a five-day vacation. And today was an interesting day. My Matayom 6 class that I teach, I had this grand idea for their class. The title of the course I'm supposed to teach them is called "English on the Job." So the course would start with lessons in resume creation and move from there onto job searching and then end on job interviews. It sounds like a logical progression that will take me through the semester and really benefits the students before they go off to university. It sounds great!!!

     ...

     ...

     ...

     

     And then I start teaching it. Cue the face smack.

     Everything I believed was a lie! I felt my own lesson plan crash and burn within moments. The worst part (and also a really good part) was that I have this fantastic co-teacher who is a total sweetheart and she just watches. She probably doesn't know that my plan is falling to pieces around me and part of me believes that maybe some of what I'm teaching is new to her as well. It isn't until the students to turn her, and I look to her as well -- with what I assume to be desperation in my eyes -- that she becomes the savoir of all things and explains in Thai.

     Then it's like magic! The world is filled with sunshine and rainbows and unicorns DO exist!! My students understand!! A wave of relief washes over me. I realize that all is not lost. My co-teacher is on my team and not a spy to report back to the other Thai teachers that I don't know what I'm doing .....

     I hope.

     The rest of Saturday teaching passes much the same. I teach. My students somewhat understand and I take many mental notes on how to alter my teaching.

     I return to my house after work, still friendless and lonely and I do what I do best. I set up a chair right inside of my roll top door, eat dinner, and people watch until it feels socially acceptable to close my "door." I spend the rest of my night perusing the internet and chatting with anyone awake stateside (mostly Brendan) and fall asleep stoked to have a day off.

Street view from my house.

      Monica's also back into teaching mode. Tuesday night was the last night of the flower festival in Phayao. She was excited for that because that meant the fireworks were stopping.  AND she was already settling into her new role as an MEP teacher. So rather than teaching 15 different classes and jumping from classroom to classroom, she has one class with one set of students that she teaches consistently all week. She works with a Thai co-teacher and they share responsibilities like walking the students to lunch, doing a club activity, walking the students to the pool. It all sounds very nice. And even though her students are a handful, she likes (most) of them.

     Plus she only has to memorize like 30 names. While I get to memorize over 200. I'm only slightly jealous of that.