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We don't need no educationNov 7, 2006
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Ratanasuksa School (or so we have been told:)
Ratana is deceptively quiet between classes
Ratanasuksa
| Hey all, So it's offical, CB and I are teachers. We began work on Wednesday and have a pretty hectic schedule. Between us we split 1st and 2nd grade (600 students) and 15 hours of after school tutoring. So far, things have gone well, no traumas to report yet. We work at Ratanasuksa School, which about a 25 minutes walk from our apartment (just like in the Haven). The school is huge and has about 2000 kids, all under the age of 13. For our class, we have an assistant teacher, who is the head English teacher and scares the hell out of the children as well as us. To be fair, she is very nice most of time and very stern all of the time. Luckily, that means that she deals with discipline and we get to be the good guys. Our lessons consist of repetition and repetition and repetition and repetition :) We worry about the level of comprehension but it's hard to monitor with 50 children in each class. Typically, the same 5 or 6 kids raise their hands and the other 45 children pray we don't notice. Starting out there was not much of a lesson plan and we had to wing it. What do you do when you're winging it with hundreds of 7 years olds who don't speak English? You sing them Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Does anyone realize how hard the word "world" is to pronounce? We didn't until about half way through the lesson. However, it's all good. After many "please repeats" they all succesfully sang to us. Oh, and the most entertaining part of school so far (not for us, for the children), we sang.....brace yourself Kate's friends....the National Anthem. Our boss crashed our second class and told the children in Thai that if they (50 of them) sang us the Thai National Anthem we would return the favor by singing the American National Anthem...just the two of us. I (Kate) thought I was having one of those dreams where you show up to class naked. We had a successful performance hopefully with no further encore. For the record, CB was not so traumatized and would indulge the kids in another performance if she had some notice in a language she understands. Anyway, stayed tuned for more adventures in teaching. I'm sure we'll have many hilarious anectdotes from the classroom and beyond. Love, Kate and Carla |
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