teaching the teachers

Since I am a full time teacher, trained at a University, I was thinking I might get abused, and put in the worst school, not that the schools are that bad. Either way, the exact opposite occurred--I'm living the life.

I work in a school called CBAT(college of business administration and tourism), its about 30 minute drive away(in an airconditioned car!!!). I work with two other guy volunteers, Johann(from Sweeden) and Andy(from the UK). They have both taught in Thailand before and Johann has specifically taught at this school, so that was very comforting. But this time, we aren't working with kids, we are working with teachers.

The three of us teach about 20 or so teachers, who teach English, computers, tourism and accounting at the college. They are also all female. Since they are on summer break, they are able to have the time to take this class. It will last all month.

Johann kinda took over yesterday which was great. He knew exactly what to do. I mean I know what I need to do in the classroom, but giving out stickers and assigning a seating chart is not something you do with students who are between the ages of 24 and 60.

We did introductions, had them write out their names, subjects taught, ages, interests, hobbies and favorites like movies, food, drinks etc. Although, the 2 guys spelled favorite with a u, the word color apparently has a u in it also. While they struggled with the grammer part (like instead of saying "I teach computers, they would said I'm teach computers), overall they had a good mastery of basic English. It was cute, when we did our examples, we just said "Hi my name is Lacy....., they said "Hello, allow me to introduce myself, my name is..." It was soo cute and very proper sounding.

Then we set up prompts and had them ask each other questions about their families while we monitored and corrected. They have the biggest issues with past vs. present tense, because they don't have that in Thai language.

Speaking of, while we are teaching English, we also spend the first week learning Thai. It's really tough. It is a "tonal" language, and the accent on a word can change the meaning completely. For example, if you say the word Kao in different ways, it could mean anything from rice, to knee(as in the body part), to a funky smell. It's very difficult for me to try to speak the language, although I am starting to realize how easy it is to understand it. I mean, I hate when people can't understand me, or don't listen to me when we are both speaking the same language, so its really difficult for me to try to speak and have the other person not understand/comprehend. It's very frustrating.

Back from the tangent, the students we have though are so sweet. Today they brought us Thai coffee, which was actually really good, and some water. They also want to take us on a field trip next week to Ban Chang.

As this is an English class, they were joking around and telling us that if any of them were to speak thai during the class, we are suppose to charge them 5 baht. So as a joke, whenever someone speaks thai the rest of the class says "5 baht, 5 baht". The thai like to repeat things.

All in all, the teaching is going very well. Like I said, I really lucked out! I heard a few horror stories about behavior management in some of the other classrooms, but the only thing I really need to worry about is them talking while we are. They are also very sweet and seem to have a great time doing whatever. We laugh and joke around more then anything in class!

By the way, I didn't realize it, but my blog before wouldn't allow "anonymous people" or people without blogs to post, but I have changed that, so I encourage you to write comments, questions, critiques, etc.

peace