Teaching Frustrations

Teaching in Thailand, as Margo likes to put it is “like an extended vacation.” We have lots of free time, but don’t get me wrong; teaching in Thailand can be frustrating at times. Here is a list of frustrations (the other Farangs seem to agree on these):
-I only see students once a week, so they tend to forget whatever they learned the week before and also tend to forget their homework
-I have over 870 students, so there isn’t much of a personal connection with the majority of the students and not to mention a lot of grading.
-Students come late to class all of the time (sometimes as late as 20 minutes) and there is not much I can do about it
-I sometimes get the feeling I’m talking (or shouting) to myself in class because students either don’t listen (I’m sure that happens everywhere) and/or can’t understand a word I’m saying. They nod along but when I talk to them individually I realize they have no idea what I’m saying.
-Unless students actually drop out, students can’t fail. They are passed onto the next grade no matter what, which is hard when students don’t come to class and therefore have no grades.
-In some classes hardly any of the students can understand what I’m saying (and I have upper-classmen!) so I sometimes have to have one student translate for me when something is important, but since I can’t speak Thai I have no way of knowing if he or she is translating correctly
-The most frustrating thing is that the concept of cheating does not exist in Thailand. We are told to ignore cheating because, unfortunately, it’s an integrated part of the Thai education system. So I’ve found that if a class (or at least a group of students in a class) does well, the whole class does well. If a class does bad, the whole class does bad (with some exceptions of course.) Out of 21 classes and 2 listening tests each, I had only one class that actually stayed quiet for the entire test. It happened to be one of my top classes, so they didn’t really need to cheat anyway.
Aside from these frustrations…I have some great students who I really enjoy teaching. Even in the tougher classes to teach (the ones that can never stay in their seats and never pay attention), there is a sprinkling of students that I can see are actually paying attention, so I just focus my lesson on them. They are the ones that actually come to class to learn (obviously every teacher dreams all of their students were like this.) Out of 870-something students, I do recognize most of them and know at least a few names from each class. I always like seeing them outside of class and off-campus. I have become closer with the girls on the volleyball team, a few are my students.
Last Thursday a group of my students asked me if I was busy Sunday night. They said they wanted to tell me about Thai culture, so I thought we were just meeting at the school, but when Phin (one of my students) got there, she had me follow her on motorbike where we met the rest of the group. They took me around the night market, buying me drinks and snacks I’ve never tried before. We (5 of my students and I) painted pottery while talking about Lampang, Thai culture, and American culture. I can definitely say that it was my favorite Sunday evening in Lampang. We walked around while Beauty (another student) took pictures (they took me around as a project for their other English teacher). Klaw (yet another student) said “people must think we are super-stars because she is taking so many pictures of us.” I met Phin’s parents and little sister. They gave me a Chinese cake and “pocket money” since it was Chinese New Year’s Eve, they are Chinese, and they own a Chinese bakery. The majority of the better English speakers among my students take a “special class” after school and/or on the weekends. Talking to some of my students, I realized that a few of them take an extra class (in various subjects) everyday of the week for about 2 hours everyday!
The big assignment I gave to my students is to write and perform a movie of a genre they had to pick out of a hat. They’ll be performing it next week, so I’m really excited to see the results. Judging from the scripts, some of them will be pretty funny. Cinderella “with a twist” seems to be a common theme. By a twist I mean, instead of losing her shoe, she loses her wig (and gives the whole town lice when all the girls in the town tried it on) and in another version, she loses her underwear haha.
School ends in 1 month. After that I have about a month before I head to China with Margo and Apple for 12 days from the end of March to the beginning of April. After that I’m not sure what I’m doing…I guess it all depends on money at that point, since China will be draining a lot of my funds since the visa alone cost 150 USD. It will be Apple’s first time out of the country, and its bound to be an awesome trip. We still got some planning to do. The month of March is also still a mystery. At this point everything is up in the air for me since I don’t want to make any major commitments until I hear back from the Peace Corps (I recently sent in my full medical package and said June 2009 was the earliest I could leave.) Otherwise, I may stay for another semester. My friends seem to think I may never come home, but don’t worry I’ll be back soon enough.
Just a short story I’d like to share:
I was out with Margo and Maprang (one of the young Thai English teachers at our school) at a club on Saturday night. It’s a friendly gesture for someone to come up and cheers glasses. A guy came up to me and “clinked” glasses and said something in Thai a couple times. All I could make out was “len footbon! Len footbon!,” as he pointed towards himself and then me. He continued talking and said “Len footbon at lampangkanalaynee” and pointed to Maprang and I and said “teachers.” I finally understood what he was trying to say- that I had played football (soccer) with him at our school…and that he’s a student! I was a bit surprised, not exactly that a student was out at a club (he claimed to be 20), but that he actually came up to me at the club and announced he was a student. Now I wonder how many students saw Margo and I when we danced on stage at another club a few months ago!