welcome back to school!

i am shocked at how much i dont hate this. i was sure, especially after last week,

that i would be awful, my kids would be devils and i would have no idea what i was doing. it turns out i was wrong.

at my school, kasintorn vittaya, which goes from kindergarten to about grade 6, there are 4 foreign teachers. myself and steinar split p1-6, with me taking the three youngest. beth is from the philippines and teaches kindergarten, as she is the "head" of the foreign teachers, and there is another girl who teaches chinese.

for us, all of our lesson plans are pretty much already written. the kids all have a book to follow for english and we essentially have to make sure they get through it, with activities and worksheets that are already planned out. so there really isnt much for us to do except stand at the front of the classroom and say the words. as someone else put it, we are getting paid for our accents and for being white, as here in thailand, they are kind of obsessed with that concept. apparently, sometimes they wont even hire someone on the basis of race.

so we have breakfast and lunch provided for us in the separate cafeteria for teachers, where we pretty much sit together, segregated from the rest of the staff. it is difficult because not only is there a language barrier, but weve been told that they often will resent us, since we are getting paid so much more than they are and do less work. i really cant blame them.

i have four classes at each level, making it a total of twelve which i see twice a week each. for the first day, i was told to not have them start lessons. i expected such but had no idea what to do with 50 minutes and kids who could barely understand what i was saying. the typical name games and icebreakers were out. luckily steinar had told me about something they had done in their training group where the kids draw three pictures and share. i modified it and just had them draw pictures of their family, where they live, and what they do for fun, as i walked around and talked to them, trying to learn their names (which is another post completely).

i now have a large and ever-growing collection of personal anime, as that is what most of these kids automatically draw when asked to draw people of any kind. most of them are even quite good. o, and all the females always have boobs and they use rulers for anything they have to write.

im thinking ill use their pictures as wallpaper to liven up my apartment.