Monday, October 21, 2013

Practice Teaching & The Last Week in BKK

At night when I can't sleep I go the window at the end of the hall and watch the trains go by. Our hotel might as well be a stop on the Sky Train for how close we are to the nearest station--from early morning to midnight, bright white trains zoom past our windows in a constant loop.  I like to watch the small dot people embark and scatter. I like digesting Bangkok from this 9th floor view and I like to imagine that if the trains were just a little faster, they could stitch together a thin white line that would wrap around the entire city. From this night window, the sounds of Bangkok are quieter and even the unrelenting rain with its thunder and crash is nothing but some damp whisper.

But, for the most part, I've gotten used to the clashing sounds of Bangkok. The whistles and trains and whirring AC machines and bells and yells in Thai about buying sausage or riding tuk-tuks. It's as if there is an orchestra buried deep in the pit of the city that is never quite finished warming up, creating dissonance with all its moving parts focusing solely on themselves.

I've gotten so used to all of this that it's hard to imagine that in just eight days I'll be leaving Bangkok for Yangtalad, my small village in the Kalasin province of Isaan in North Eastern Thailand. Then, I will be a teacher in charge of hundreds of students. I will no longer be living with a group of my peers in a cushy hotel with bottled water and laundry service, but in a single house on the outskirts of the jungle. I will no longer spend nights eating at restaurants and going to bars because the fanciest eating establishment in my village is the local 7/11. Clearly there are several large changes coming my way. I'm not sure how I will handle them but they are coming at us at such a speed that I'm not sure we have much time to truly prepare in any other way than to hold on desperately to a railing that may or may not even exist.

However, one of the ways in which we're able to ~**kind of**~ prepare is through a week of practice teaching at a local school in Bangkok. Starting today and carrying through Friday (with a random holiday on Wednesday because Thailand), we'll be teaching in pairs to a small group of students for ~2 hours a day. In true Thai style, we weren't told the age of our students nor their level of English proficiency before arriving at the school this morning and were greeted with a large, awkward ceremony in which photos were taken and flowers were presented to us and a lot of people bowed and said things in Thai and then laughed.

We then split off into our pairs to play games and teach key English phrases like "I like to read," (which was quickly shortened to "I like book") and "I like to eat pizza" (shortened, predictably, to PIZZA!). The students may not speak English well, but they are experts at blatant mockery and saying "We understand teach-uhh" mostly only when they very much don't. But they were also kind and eager once things started rolling, especially when they learned that I will literally do anything to make someone laugh.

And even though certain aspects of this first day of teaching were frustrating, it's important to remember that my job is not to teach English fluency, but rather to offer them a different perspective on what education is and what it can be. Thai students spend their entire lives in strict little boxes learning everything through rote memorization--as foreign teachers, our role is one of expanding these boxes and, hopefully, getting them to come outside of the box and sniff around for a while. And that's a really empowering position to be in because we get to expose them to the wonder of this precious world.

My job is to dazzle and fascinate and I know that eventually I will do just that; for now, however, I'll focus on getting these little tykes to learn that screaming the word PIZZA! when I ask them what they like to eat doesn't really count as knowing how to speak English.

Cody

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