Last week the semester finally began at my school, Suksanareewittiya School. As I prepared my lesson plans for the week I tried to keep in mind all that we had been taught during orientation. It was actually very hard to plan for the week because there were so many variables. The laid back attitude of most Thais led them to tell us very little information about our classes. As I've already posted, I knew I would be teaching M3 (the equivalent of American freshmen) and M6 (seniors) but that was pretty much it. I had no curriculum, no schedule, and nothing really to indicate what I should prepare for. I was just told to be in the office by 8:00 am on Monday.
Rather than teach them any particular vocabulary or grammar on the first day, I decided to keep my lesson to strictly an introduction of me and some activities to get them talking. Because I had no indication as to their proficiency with English, I prepared the same lesson for M3 and M6. I knew I would be able to add or subtract to the lesson both in terms of quantity and difficulty once I got an idea about each particular class.
So with my lesson plan ready and my clothes freshly ironed I set off to school. It's conveniently located directly across the street from my apartment so the commute is pretty outstanding. I arrived at my desk and was immediately handed my weekly schedule. Seemed to me to be a good start. I was then told that the first two periods were canceled because the students had an assembly. Looking at my schedule, I noticed that, because the first two periods were cancelled, my first class of the day wasn't until 6th period. This gave me time to relax but also allowed me to become increasingly nervous. It didn't help that every teacher in the English department, upon learning that my first class would be M6/7 responded with an, "uh oh good luck." Apparently, M6/7 is one of the worst classes in the school. I was perplexed when looking at my schedule and seeing various numbers like the 6/7 above. It turns out that classes are grouped based on academic ability. So for M3 it goes from M3/1 to M3/12. For M6 it goes from M6/1 to M6/8. I later learned that for M3, the higher the class number, the higher the class's academic ability. This confused me because I knew that M6/7 was a very bad class. I was told that M6/7 and M6/8 (all athletes) are the worst classes in the M6 grade. Assuming that it must work the opposite of M3 then, I asked if my M6/1 students were going to be my best M6 students. I was told no, my M6/5 class is my best class. So basically, there seems to be little rhyme or reason to the class number. It is going to be one of the things I need to learn to deal with as the semester progresses. The bottom line is that, like most teachers, there are going to be some classes I love and there are going to be some classes I don't really look forward to.
The other thing I learned on Monday morning was that I am actually working closely with a number of other teachers and basically taking their class once a week. So I see each class one time per week. They take an English class every day but their "core teacher" teaches them the other four days of the week. It is my job to focus on their pronunciation and speaking ability rather than their grammar and writing abilities. Over the course of the week I met the other teachers in the office and also the five teachers (three for M3 and two for M6) whose classes I will be teaching once per week. The thing that really shocked me was how poor many of these teachers are with English. They know the ins and outs of the grammar side of things better than most Americans do, but their speaking ability is unbelievably bad. It makes sense why they would want to give the students exposure to native English speakers at least once a week. However, that being said, seeing so many students is a bit overwhelming. There are 50 students in a class and I teach 20 classes each week so I see a total of 1,000 students each week. Learning all of their names will be quite an achievement.
Armed with a basic understanding of how (I think) the system works, I was ready for my first class. Many of the core teachers accompany us to our classes this week in an effort to keep the students from walking all over the new teachers. The core teacher for my first class, along with three other M6 classes, is P'Noi. She is very nice but I think I'm going to be more comfortable next week when I have the class to myself. She spent the entire period translating everything I said into Thai. Obviously, this is extremely counterproductive when trying to get them to learn English. Other than that, the class went as well as I could have expected my first class to go. The students were certainly as rowdy as I was warned they would be but my voice is loud enough that I was able to maintain control for the majority of the class. Interestingly, this seems to be a problem for many Thai teachers. They often use microphones to project their voice so that the whole class can hear. I was offered my own microphone and speaker the first day but I declined. I would not have enjoyed the restriction of having to stand at the front of the room the whole time with the thing in my hand. I prefer to walk around the classroom throughout my lesson.
After this class I had my first M3 class, M3/5. My core teacher for this class is actually a young teacher named Por who I've become friendly with over the past two weeks and she was very helpful. She didn't translate anything until the students really couldn't understand something I was trying to explain. Only then would she give them a hint in Thai to help them figure it out. Por is certainly one of the better core teachers I work with. Two of them actually don't even show up to class. I prefer this because I like having my own control over the class and I feel like the students respect you more if they know that you can control the class without the help of a Thai teacher. The final core teacher was definitely less than helpful. She actually corrected, to the whole class, a mistake that I had missed in something that a student had written on the board. Later she came running in and announced that class was over. I waited until she left and then kept the students five minutes late because I was so annoyed. Hopefully, it was just the first week and she will back off in the future.
Overall, the first week went great. As nervous as I was Monday morning, I was actually extremely excited for each class by the end of the week. I really enjoy being in front of the room and teaching these kids about my native language. There were certainly some challenging classes. The lower M3 class are really hard to communicate with and many of them just misbehave the entire class. I keep reminding myself to have patience with these classes because I really feel like the system has screwed them. They are put in these classes and its painfully obvious that many teachers don't give them half the effort that they give to the higher ranked classes. How are they supposed to move up if the teachers don't give them the necessary tools to do so? The other thing I realized when they misbehave is that I was enough of a smart ass in high school to know how to deal with the smart asses in the back of the room. I actually like those types of students sometimes because it beats the alternative of having a whole class look at you and not respond to anything you are saying. I usually just make the bad kids who sit in the back be the first ones to answer a question or read in front of the class.
On the other side of the spectrum, there are some really outstanding classes. Many of the more proficient M6 classes are very good at English. They are all 18 and 19 years old so I approach these classes a little bit more casually than I would otherwise. Some of these classes are certainly going to develop into more laid back, conversation oriented lessons. The better M3 classes are equally amazing. There have been a number of them that I walked out of in a great mood because the students were so good and they clearly just got the lesson. One class in particular stands out. I had M3/11 last Friday. They are a really smart class and I knew that they would be great with all the material I was going over. Like I said before, the lesson plan was just basic introductory things. One of the questions was "What is your favorite sport?" I had one of them write it on the board and then I had them repeat it after me in unison. As many people know, the letter "r" is traditionally a challenge for Asian speakers. In addition to this, they often confuse "v" with "w." This class, for some reason, had particular trouble with the word "favorite." As a result, I had a bunch of 14 year old Thais pronouncing "favorite" as "faw-o-lit." For the life of me I could not get them to say it the right way. As hard as I tried, they just couldn't do it. After many attempts, the entire room was just laughing, as was I, because they all knew that they just couldn't say it the right way. M3/11 is certainly a class I am going to be looking forward to this coming week.
Speaking of this week, we have off until Thursday. Apparently, all of the Thai teachers must take the kids camping. I don't know how this works with 3,000 kids but it should be interesting. So now I've worked five days and I get three off. I think I could get used to this Thai system.
I think I will be traveling this weekend to one of the islands in the Gulf of Thailand. Should be a pretty great trip. I've got a tough life over here, three days off and then a trip to the beach. Expect a post sometime next week about how it went.
No comments:
Post a Comment