Reading, Writing and Canceled Classes

By Shelly



First Day of School: Clay, Dan and I

On my first day in Phanom, we went to my school I would be teaching at called Phanom Adun Witthaya to get a brief tour and our schedules.   My schedule consisted of 3 Health, 4 P.E., 6 Computer and 1 English class.  I would be teaching in the English program where all subjects are taught in English, but are not necessarily “English” classes.  

Most of my classes fell under this program with the exceptions of my English class, M4 (10^th grade) P.E. class, M6 (12^th grade) P.E. and Computer class.  I am guessing that they assigned these classes based on my resume.  This should be rather interesting since what I know what to do on the computer is not exactly what they want me to teach.  I will have to be at least one step ahead of my M6 computer class as I am teaching them Basic Design.  (Yup, that is what the curriculum has me teaching!)  The Thai school system is a little chaotic at times.  I didn’t actually receive any of my curriculums until the second week of school, and was still receiving my curriculums up until this morning, 3.5 weeks into the semester!  Wait, no, there is still one computer class I have yet to receive a curriculum for.  The motto here however is “go with the flow” and “be flexible. “  Those are both understatements in my opinion.  Nonetheless, here we go! 



Me and Sharon with my M1 students on Waikru Day



Since I am teaching all different levels for different subjects, that means multiple lesson plans.  For example, my M1 Health class will be learning all the different body systems (digestive, excretory, respiratory, skeletal, muscular, cardiovascular, ect.), M2 will be learning personalities, self-esteem, managing stress, emotions, dating relationships and STI’s/AIDs (kind of intense here!), and my M3’s will have learned all about advertising and how it affects us, marriage/family, and something else I can’t remember.  WHEW!  (I’ll let you in on a secret: I actually LOVE teaching health!)  I left it up to my P.E. classes to choose which sport they wanted to learn and play during the semester, so I will be learning AND teaching handball to my seniors with a little yoga thrown in, and basketball to my other 3 levels.  I’ve already started my basketball classes on doing squats and holding squats with squat hops to get their defensive position in check JIt is fun to have the ability to teach them whatever I want, which has already started out with what a warm-up / cool-down consists of and the different types of stretching you do for each.  Next will be the F.I.T.T. principle!  :) Computers I have decided to teach them how to make a webpage and have them create their own for their school projects, ect.  Thank you YouTube /Google! 

In the first week of school, the students bombarded me and the other new farang (foreign) teacher with questions such as “What is your favorite color,” “When is your birthday,” and “Where are you from?”   They were very curious to know everything about us.  Now, I get self-esteem boosts almost daily with the girls complimenting me with “Teacha, very beautiful today!”  I’ll have to admit that at first I was a little suspicious of brown-nosing, but upon living here longer, I have realized that Thais are very good at complimenting when they see it.  I’m not going to lie, it’s pretty nice J 



Kluay and Pang



Memorizing the kids names (and these are just their nicknames) has proved to be more challenging than anticipated since there are repeats of some names in different grades, and I have maybe two normal names;  John and Nick.  The others consist of names like Book, Earth, Tiger, It (poor kid!), Phat (pronounced Pat), One, Frong, Atom, Eye, Ink, and Dodo. One of the kids’ names is Kluay, pronounced “Klu-eye” and means banana, but if you say it phonetically, it means something very different in Thai (pardon my french, but it means "dick").  Needless to say, after a few mistakes and a lot of giggles, we all tend to stop midway through saying her name to think about which way is the right way and sometimes just let the kids finish the name.  I do however tend to remember the boys names more since they are typically the ones who need reprimanding.

 

M2 Students with Sharon, Eunice and I on Waikru Day

 Other challenges include going to a class and having none of the kids present.  Usually if you wait around 10 minutes, they will show up since they might be coming out of another class late.  This could be in part to classes ending and starting at the same time.  There is no “5 minutes between classes” like we have in America.  Other times though, a class just simply will not show up and you will find out after waiting around those 10 or 15 minutes and checking with the English department that there is something else going on and class is canceled for that period. 

Oh my.  Such is life here in Thailand.  Mai Ben Rai!