The teaching one

Alight, alright, here’s the long awaited teaching blog. The reason I have not written about teaching  in Thailand yet is because of two main reasons: the first is that the 1^st term ended 3 weeks ago so I’ve just been grading, teaching random summer school courses, and preparing for the next semester. The second reason is that the school employs some of the most dramatic and incompetent people that I have ever met so a great deal of my time is spent tangled up in endless school drama that is reminiscent of being in high school (and not the good part).  I don’t want to sound too harsh here, there are some incredible people at the school who I absolutely love being around and who are admirable and manage to rise above the barrage of gossip, name calling, and tattle tailing that seem to pervade most basic communications at the school. More on this later, it frustrates me just thinking about it.

Since this is my first real teaching post I’ll give you some background info on the school. I teach at a private bilingual international school that is regarded as the most prestigious school in Phuket and comes with a price tag to match.  There are about 2,200 students crammed into 2 buildings even though we are at capacity for 3 buildings.  The third building was supposed to be finished in May so the school accepted enough students to fill it. However, either because of bad weather or because the building’s circular design confused the construction workers it still is far from being finished.  Instead of sending the new kids elsewhere there are now classes held quietly in the library, in rooms without air con and some classes with similar material are just taught together regardless of levels and ages.  The school brags of power point capabilities, interactive white boards, and top if the line educatory devices. It’s a complete joke. At one point they may have worked, but long ago the set ups either broke, had pieces stolen, or otherwise disappeared.  We have a proper lab and lab technician and access to supplies but we need to put in material requests at least 6 weeks in advance and the some parts of the request might be rejected, leaving teachers unable to complete experiments. This is pretty impossible anyway because teachers are switched around between classes constantly and we just found out what we will be teaching in two weeks.  

However! Teaching itself has been a great experience and I learn more about teaching everyday as things work out or crash and burn. Some of the things I’ve learned seem pretty obvious in retrospect but hey, this is all new to me! Here are the top 3 things that I stumbled upon but should have been obvious


 1.  Make friends with the troublemakers: they’re not bad kids, they are just interested in something besides your class. Find out what they like to do and incorporate it into lesson plans.

( I watched a kid that is notorious for disrupting class, picking fights, and never doing homework preforming in a play after school and he was great (nice to see that loud voice in its proper place!)Now we do more skits in class and I’ve put him in charge of getting the class quiet ;)

       2. Instead of yelling over 30 screaming kids to get them to be quiet (why does that ever make sense?!) just make them put their heads down on their desks for the first 30 seconds of class. It works like magic- chills them out with no effort and they actually seem to like it.  

            3.  If you’re bored, they’re bored.

 (I was supposed to spend 2 hrs talking about lever classifications! Yeah right!)

Simple! Probably could have figured those out with a 10 second internet search but it sticks so much better when you figure it out for yourself

I also was never given detention slips or anything comparable (they were being re-formatted) so I had to come up with alternative punishments like having disruptive kids stand in the front of the classroom by me or having sleepy kids doing jumping jacks.  Both work surprisingly well and the kids like watching their classmates do jumping jacks so much they have the sleepers jumping before I even realize they’ve drifted off!

Side note: the kids here are fantastic at art and the posters they make look professional, I have a bunch of anatomy ones at home that I just can’t get rid of.  

While teaching’s probably not my calling, I love the kids and spend a lot of time laughing (or trying not to laugh) at their antics and wise ass responses to every question. It’s only been 6 weeks but I still look forward to going to school every day.