After six months of twiddling my thumbs, contemplating the blue tile that covers every inch of my house (except of course my once white bathroom), reading an entire library full of books, and wasting hours on end coming up with things to Google, I have finally found more productive ways to spend my time. Or, maybe it’s just that the people around me have figured out how to put me to work . . . regardless, it’s heaven!!!
I’m actually teaching – and I mean really teaching. I spend Monday and Thursday mornings at the high school down the street from my house, until it’s time to walk home, grab lunch, exchange my skirt for more bike appropriate attire, and ride to the elementary school about three miles away. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are spent in much the same fashion, only I spend the mornings at the elementary school and the afternoons at the high school. There has been time set aside to lesson plan and both of my counterparts have suddenly come to terms with how important I think this is and so sit down and humor me for about an hour each week. It’s marvelous!!!! I walk into class everyday and we essentially know what we are going to teach, how we are going to teach it, and what we need to get the job done. I’m 100% positive my co-teachers have yet to be convinced of the great service we are not only doing each other, but our students, by being prepared – and really as far as I’m concerned, I don’t care if they spend the next year and four months pretending to think this is a grand and novel idea as long as it keeps happening.
Again, I have no idea what caused such drastic changes, but something in the water must have made these women see the light, because all of the sudden I am not only seen as a good resource in terms of pronunciation practice and curriculum development, but I nearly have full control over the classes. Tuke, my counterpart at the elementary school, acts like a student; she participates in all the activities, completes all of the assignments, and takes copious notes while I teach her 9, 10, and 11 year olds. When I really get stuck and just need a direct translation she jumps in and throws the kids (and me) a bone, but aside from a few comments here and there she sits back and lets me do my thing. Teaching English as a Foreign Language is far more different that I ever could have imagined. I thought coming here that I had this thing in the bag – I mean I spent the last 5 years of my life completely consumed with learning, discussing, practicing, and contemplating this whole teaching thing. Apparently it kind of makes a difference when your students can actually understand a single freaking word that comes out of your mouth. So, I go in everyday and I wing it; I do more acting, dancing, singing, and drawing than I do true teaching and usually the point I am trying to make is completely lost to them, but they are laughing, and singing, and dancing, and drawing right along with me . . . sometimes I figure it’s enough to just have some fun and that’s exactly what I’m doing.My degree is in Secondary English Education and I fully intend to return to the states and set up camp in a high school setting somewhere. However, here, in this context, I love the little kids; they are excited to learn and eager to please. Mostly they are still young enough to think that EVERYTHING I do is super cool, so they are absolutely easy to entertain and enthusiastic about even the lamest of lame ideas I come up with. There are days when I have to do nothing but drill and kill to get them to really understand and become familiar with the vocabulary. All I have to do is say the words at different speeds, yell them, whisper them, stutter them, draw them out as long as I can, or leave parts of them out completely and they are in utter rapture for an entire hour of learning a simple 10 words. It is amazing.
They are adorable, they are completely amusing, and they are a blast. We play lots of games, create bushels of art projects, invent noises and actions to represent all sorts of words and sets of instructions, and somewhere in the midst of all the silliness I think we are learning from each other. I can tell them to open up their notebooks and copy the writing on the board accompanied by pictures of the vocabulary and they immediately know what I am requesting. I am able to tell them how many minutes they have to complete an assignment and they all hold up the right amount of fingers. They are even to the point that they tell me when they need more time or are confused . . . this is unheard of in a Thai classroom, where questions come across as a personal assault to the teacher. And for my part I know when they are truly lost and don’t know how to begin asking for help, I can tell when they are bored and need something new to keep their attention, and I’m getting really good at understanding when they translate my instructions into Thai so I can correct them when they are going astray. It was such a welcome surprise to realize how little the cement walls of my hut were giving back in our isolated little relationship. I am getting out of my house, seeing people, getting to know my community, and building real relationships with my students. It reminds me a little bit of training, when I was welcomed by a parade of people on my way home each day, as I ride my bike up to the elementary school – in a matter of seconds I am surrounded by waving, shouting, groping little kids saying hello to Kru Happy (English Translation: Teacher Abby) and equipped with a bottle of cold water. I recognize and am recognized by people on my way to and from and have come to expect smiles, hellos, and waves from vendors and community members along my path. It’s starting to feel like home.
The actual act of teaching in the high school is far more challenging and a lot less entertaining. There is a group of students who have really dedicated themselves to learning the language and so participate in the lessons without coercion. Then there is a chunk of students who could simply not care less and do not see the relevance in learning English – these students tend to be boys and they are largely favored for it. And finally there is the extremely high volume of students with learning disabilities that simply get over looked, because “they can’t learn anyway.” Talk about a melting pot – only the ingredients don’t really complement one another and while the cheese melts up all nice and creamy it quickly begins to curdle as the other elements are added. Girls here are taught from a very young age (like birth) that they will never be as good as boys and so should spend their lives taking care of men and doing whatever is necessary to land one. This is in no way conducive to a productive learning environment. The girls study hard and most of them are way ahead of the game, so they finish their work and then move on to finish that of the boy sitting three rows back. This drives me crazy!! I wander around helping the large handful of students who are so far behind and struggle so severely that they have given up right along with their instructors and as I do I keep my eyes out for cheating and copying. I actually took a boy’s work away from a girl, drew a big X through it and handed it back to him to do on his own; three minutes later the kid next to him was doing it, so I repeated the process and told him to start over; I sat and watched him work on it for a few minutes and moved on. When I returned to check on him, he was doing the work, but was copying off of a friend, so another X was scratched across the page and he finally got serious and did it himself the fourth time. This isn’t a rare happening and I have made it my charge to see that it stops, even if just in my classroom. I am making a name for myself, they call me Teacher Mai Copy (mai means no), and they’re all a lot more edgy than when I first started working with them.
The diversity in ability levels and interest in the language makes the older kids less fun. They are also at an age when they aren’t easy to entertain and they certainly do not think I am a super hero; in fact, I have to work extremely hard for my “cool” points with them. But, I have found ways to start weaving myself into the fabric of their lives and the more of this I do the better response I get in class. Who would have ever thought . . . if you take the time to get to know someone they actually learn to trust and respect you. In this vein I have started stopping by after school on occasion and playing volleyball with some of the girls, I shop at places I know my student’s parents own, and I show up for all of the extra activities that happen when I’m not at the other school. It’s a different dynamic and a lot more work, but equally rewarding.
So, between biking like crazy, lesson planning, material making, teaching, playing volleyball and stalking students, planning teacher trainings, and getting ready for English camps my idle time has been significantly cut into and I couldn’t be more thankful for it.
I came here to teach, that shouldn’t be news to anyone. It was driving me crazy to sit around and watch someone else flounder when I could do a perfect breast stroke. But, getting more involved in the classroom has also been eye opening in terms of how much I was missing out on by not getting out of my house more often. My students and counterparts lit a fire under me and now I’m running around like a crazy person never saying no to anyone. I went to a vineyard and mountain temple with one of my counterparts; I accepted an invitation from my principal to join a group of teachers and principals for a night out on the town; I have even started going to aerobics again. All things I have been missing out on while I sat around feeling lonely and sorry for myself. Self pity is an ugly thing and being a hermit didn’t do me any good. This whole time, all I had to do was put the book down and go for a walk . . . something that shouldn’t have been all that hard for a person with two working legs. There was a whole village of people just waiting for me to outgrow my shell and come looking for a new one . . . I’m glad I did.
My counterpart and I spent an afternoon touring a vineyard and climbed hundreds of steps up to a beautiful temple on a mountain just outside Ban Chang. Then the very next night I joined the group previously mentioned for dinner and a show. This wasn’t quite the success that the last field trip was, but it makes for a good story. We went to a tourist town about thirty minutes down the road and had dinner by the sea. I ate about twice my body weight in food and thought I was going to explode, when someone looked around a came to the astonishing realization that there was nothing but Thai food, on this Thai table, in this Thai restaurant, in Thailand. They demanded that I be made a tuna salad. I couldn’t bear the thought of another single morsel of food reaching my palate, but there was no stopping her, she was on a mission. So, I unbuttoned the top button on my jeans, took a deep breath, downed the thing and we were off to the show. Thais have kind of warped idea of what it means to be entertained and they took me to a cabaret show. I sat through about forty-five minutes of the transvestites with great boobs and hardly anything on dancing around and lip sinking to really bad remakes, when it hit me. Now, whether it was the food that got to me or the strip tease taking place in front of my eyes is still up for debate, but regardless something offended my insides and I was sure to be sick. I got up and rushed to the bathroom and let exit all the food that forcefully entered my gut. I missed the last few minutes of the show (darn) and met up with everyone at the car, where I informed them of my illness. We headed for home, but were forced to stop six more times in my honor . . . it was awful, but I don’t think I’ll have to go to another cabaret show and they’ll probably think twice before packing me plum full of tuna again.
Oh, and did I mention aerobics????? Well it is the single most hilarious thing I have ever taken part in and I’m pretty sure that lying in bed watching movies causes me to break more of a sweat. I was given the option of two different home stay families when I moved here, neither of which actually had room for me to live with them, but both take good care of me. Pi Laan, is one of them and she does aerobics at the health station behind my house. This week she decided that it was silly that I wasn’t going and so started to come over and get me before hand. This is something I would have previously declined, but saying no doesn’t go with my new attempts at happiness and integration, so I put on my tennis and went. What I found was a bunch of middle aged and old women hoolahooping their hips off. I was dumb struck. When I asked about it, they all claimed that is was the best exercise they had ever done and got me all hooked up with equipment of my own. We hoolahooped around for about 15 minutes and then the actual class started. The class consists of 10 minutes of stretching, 15 minutes of aerobic dancing, which is more of a wiggle and shake here and there, and then 15 minutes of “ab” exercise (otherwise known as lying on your back and chatting with your neighbor), and finally after all that exertion we stretch again, because cooling down is of the utmost importance. I went every night all week and found that it actually was a good stomach workout . . . well, the sitting around yapping isn’t, but dying of laughter does wonders to tone the midsection. It’s really just one more way to get to know people and become familiar to the people who have surrounded me for months.
I joined the Peace Corps to fulfill a lifelong dream, to teach, and to become a better me. I am having to stare down my demons, my insecurities, and my fears and every time I overcome one I know that I am here doing the right thing for the right reasons and that I am going to come home really knowing myself. It took me six months, but I shed a layer of myself that was holding me back and for the first time since moving here I feel free.
