oh dear. what have i gotten myself into?

first real teaching practice with real kids. at a place called sunshine, which is pretty much an orphanage home. we had the youngest group, from about 6-8 years old. there were 14 kids in the class, 4 girls and 10 boys, one of whom has add. i went first. at multiple times during the lesson, i wanted to scream. or cry. or both.

when we were in training, we were taught that it was "culturally insensitive" to call out individual students in class because this is a culture of "saving face." this means that the opinions of their peers in public places is very important to them, and that saying one of them is doing something wrong in front of everyone would be harmful to their reputation. as such, in order to correct misbehavior problems, we were told to just make eye contact or do some other subtle hints to let them know we saw them doing what they were not suppose to. we asked about physical fights and were assured that that would not be a problem in thailand. when i came to our group today, all of that flew out the door.

being the first one to go, i was too worried about holding that above classroom control, and my class went nuts. the girls payed more attention than the boys, but at some points, i lost all of them. it was impossible to get them to follow the directions and repeat what i was saying. i tried all of what was given to me, but none of it worked. and worst of all, there was hitting and spitting and sliding around the room because they didnt have chairs or desks and writing on each other with pens and markers. it made me feel defeated.

apparently, calling them out at that age is alright if done "correctly" and those who followed me had a slightly easier time with it, though getting them to listen was still ridiculously hard. the one guy in our group who does have a teaching degree said the best advice he got was to leave it in the classroom afterwards: the kids arent going home at night and thinking about it, so we shouldnt either. the only bright side is that we did get the hard group out of the way first, and the place we are going tomorrow should be a breeze in comparison.