The End of the Ajarn (Teacher)

I still have another two months or so before I head home, but I've come to the end of a very important part of my time abroad:  Tomorrow will be my last day of teaching.  Truth be told, it's kind of bittersweet knowing that I won't be in front of the classroom anymore.

In one sense, I'm glad to be done with it.  Trying to teach English to Thai students while only being able to speak a minimal amount of Thai myself was incredibly frustrating at times.  If nothing else, I've learned a tremendous amount of patience from this job.  Although most of the students really were fantastic, there were certain classes that I definitely had a hard time enjoying.  These classes were often filled with students who constantly talked and misbehaved.  Trying to talk over fifty kids who are speaking a different language can get pretty annoying.  In addition to the language barrier and the behavior issues, the fact of the matter is that I just didn't see a number of my classes enough to have a noticeable impact on them.  Each of my twenty classes has fifty kids in it and I saw each class only once a week.  If I was able to see every class, every week, it still would have been hard to have an impact on all 1,000 of my students.  Add to this the fact that I almost never had an entire week full of classes.  There were days off, or at the very least periods off, almost every single week.  I'm certainly not complaining about this and I'm thrilled I was able to take advantage of my days off, but the point is that my work with the students seems to have been largely unsuccessful because of it.  For example, I saw my Friday morning classes a grand total of seven times.  A miracle worker would have struggled to teach these kids anything of substance in that limited amount time.

On the flip side, I really did love teaching.  Ninety-nine percent of the students were fantastic and unbelievably respectful.  Walking down the hall and getting a wai  (I would have called them Asian bows before I came here) from every student that passed was a really good feeling.  The fact that every time I walked into a classroom, all the students stood up and said "good morning teacher" in unison and remained standing until I said "good morning class, you may sit" was pretty awesome.  The fact that they all stood once again before I dismissed them and said "thank-you teacher, see you again next class" was just icing on the cake.  In addition to the the joy I got from the students, I really enjoyed the actual act of teaching.  It was a great feeling to see in the eyes of a class of fourteen-year-olds that something I had spent the last five minutes trying to explain was finally clicking.  There were many times where I'd walk out of a classroom so pumped because I knew that the kids got everything I was saying and the lesson was a complete success.  That kind of visible reward, while frustrating when it's absent, is amazing when it's present.

Do I think I'll choose to go into teaching as a profession when I get home?  Probably not.  But that doesn't mean I haven't absolutely loved the vast majority of my time as a teacher over here.  It has been a tremendous experience and it's definitely not something I'll ever forget.

Now that my nostalgia has been fully exhausted, on to a few fun things from the past week.  Last Friday there was a goodbye ceremony for my co-worker Jim and me.   We were told a few days beforehand that we were expected to give a goodbye speech to the entire student body....in Thai.  Seeing as I don't speak more than a few common phrases of the language, I knew I was screwed.  Fortunately, I was later told that the speech could be half English, half Thai.  I took advantage of this leeway and really didn't deliver much more than the opening greeting and the closing thank-yous in Thai.  The way I see it, asking me to give a speech in front of 3,000 people is one thing; asking me to do it in a language I don't speak is just plain mean.  Overall though, the ceremony was really nice.  First, the director of the school presented both Jim and me with gifts of flowers and an awesome traditional Thai shirt.  Then it was speech time.  Like I said, I used what limited Thai I knew and kept it short and sweet.  After the speech, a student representative gave each of us a gift from the student body.  Then, all of the students that we taught rushed up to us with roses and thank-yous.  It definitely fell in line with the reasons I described above as to why the students are so amazing.  The celebration ended with a ton of pictures with various people, many of which can be seen below.  Needless to say, I felt pretty important.

Receiving my gift from the director

Speech time

Official student gift

Picture with the administration

Gifts from the students

Jim and I with our coordinator, P'Moo, and one of my co-teachers, P'Noi.

Some members of the English Department

The one other fun thing that happened this week was my involvement with the teachers' volleyball team at my school. I guess each year six local government agencies (three schools, the public electric company, the court system, and the police department) compete in various athletic activities.  I was asked to play on the men's volleyball team for my school.  Heading into the match I really didn't know what to expect.  I was however, pretty pumped when I was given my own uniform with the school's name written on the back. Upon arriving for our first match and viewing our team I noticed that we looked alarmingly like volleyball's version of "the little giants."  Unfortunately, life is not a movie and we got pretty annihilated.  We played our second, and consequently final, match this afternoon and once again it wasn't pretty.  That being said, I really had a blast during the two matches.  All of the other teachers in the English department get really into the events so they came to watch.  They told me all week that they were going to come "cheer me up."  I finally had to tell them that I needed to be sad before they could cheer me up but would love it if they would come "cheer me on."  We had a lot of fun at both matches and I really enjoyed the chance to get to know some of my fellow teachers a little bit better.

Now that teaching is done I have quite a bit of traveling coming up.  This weekend I head to Cambodia to visit the famous Angkor Wat with a few friends.  If you've seen the Angelina Jolie movie "Tomb Raider," you've seen Angkor Wat.  It's supposed to be pretty amazing.  Two weeks ago, Thailand and Cambodia were involved in a bit of a border skirmish so I'm hoping we don't run into any problems.  I've heard that the area we are going to is quite safe but it should be intriguing nonetheless.  Expect an interesting post on that topic next week.  At the end of next week I begin a two week long journey through Laos and Vietnam followed immediately by a week in the south of Thailand.  It should be a pretty awesome few weeks.  There will definitely be some very long posts when I return.