Little Rascals
Posted in Alex's Blog on September 9, 2010
They should have been a circus sideshow perhaps even the main attraction. They clambered across the table not paying any heed to anybody or anything in their path, one ran up slapped me in the leg and bailed under the table, he proceeded to repeat this act for the remainder of the class while another little angel happily launched handfuls of crayons at me from across the room. I made my way over to one bright eyed girl to start taking the roll which involved having each child write their name on a roll sheet, she smiled sweetly accepted my pen drew and nice big circle on the page, I paused for a moment with my mouth open, realized there was not a whole lot I could do, so I just gave her a big hearty thank you and congratulated her for her beautiful artwork. This was the English class I would be teaching while I worked at a language school in exchange for Thai lessons, and it seemed I had my work cut out for me.
I filled in the rest of the roll sheet as best I could completely guessing the spelling of the majority of the childrens names. I then moved on the way I had seen so many of my teachers do in the past by writing my name on the board (this would prove to be the final undoing for the day). I finished writing “Khru Alex“ (Teacher Alex) on the board and then pronounced it for the children, almost instantaneously a kid named Ohm 2 decided that, that would be the extent of his English learning for the day, to affirm this to me he shouted my name back drawing out the final sound so it became “Alexxxxxx” and then just to reiterate and emphasize his learning he pounded the table with his little fist. He didn’t tire of this (a swift flying elbow sorted him out……..joke!), in fact to be honest after about 6 of his renditions of my name I accepted defeat and answered all of his shouts with louder ones of his name and a big slap of my leg. We joined dots to make a picture of a kangaroo and then colored them in and let me just say that there were quite a few sorry looking kangaroos that day, one kid in apparent disregard for conventional coloring decided to instead just color the entire page blue, rainbow kangaroos it seems are also quite popular Thai kids. I would say we played a game but that would imply that at least some of the rules were followed, which was certainly not the case. The children preferred the “throw the over sized dice around the room” version of the game followed by the “hide under the table” game.
We did play hide and go seek though, which was somewhat of a relief as it was quiet and the air wasn’t filled with projectiles. I savored the peace, I had been feeling pretty burned out most of the day, since I had started teaching and taking lessons several of the days of my week consisted of training in the morning going to Thai lessons in the afternoon followed by afternoon training and then rushing back to the school to teach evening classes. Also I wouldn’t be able to have the Sunday off from training as I was fighting the following Saturday, and had already missed an entire days training due to getting settled into the teaching, the combination of these factors it seemed led to exhaustion.
The teaching really wasn’t that bad, sure the children are little rascals but I also know for a fact I was a terror when I was a child who wasn’t. I think the language barrier is the biggest obstacle, you just can’t communicate what you want the younger children to do or understand what they are saying to you therefore it’s practically impossible to hold their attention (two children were far more interested in watching the new pavement get laid then listen to me sing the alphabet song “A, B, C, D, E, F, G….”) the older ones however are a lot easier to engage since they can understand some of what I’m talking about. Really I quite enjoyed it, just as I said that day I was pretty worn out. On a side note learning Thai is going great, it amazing how much easier a subject can be when you actually want to learn it and I’m trying to use it as often as possible “kor nom chocolate noy? krap” -do you have chocolate milk?
*the explanation about how I ended up with this job is coming up in the next post, I had absolutely no intention of actually teaching English when I came out here, nor do I really know how what I’m doing…
