Today was a really rewarding moment for me, I am back to whole class teaching of classes of 45+ children and this week we have been learning about food, and the question "What food do you like?". After what I thought was a really rubbish lesson with the children learning nothing, I headed back to the staffroom feeling a bit down, thinking that the children were not gaining anything. However, an hour later, 3 little girls came over to me with a piece of paper. On it they had made a survey - at the top was the question "What food do you like" and underneath were all the responses we had covered in class - chicken, fish, rice, pineapple, cake etc. Bless these little girls, they had asked their friends the question and made a tick list of their answers- shows that they were engaged after all and had learnt something. Times like this which make the tough bits worthwhile!
My school dinner....everyday...
I think that the main thing is that teaching styles in Thailand and England are very different. At the beginning of the project, I was planning lessons with loads of games, I would spend hours making resources and feel really disheartened when children were reluctant to join. I tried to use some of the theory I have learnt at uni, e.g. VAK (visual, audio and kinaesthetic learning) by using flashcards, singing songs, having the children run to the board to point at things etc... However, this is not how children are taught here, at least in my school. Teachers do not seem to plan any lessons, instead they have a textbook for each subject which they work from, mainly by children chanting, reading off the board and copying into their books. There is no differentiation, no groupwork, no learning through talk, and once I embraced the fact that my strategies weren't going to work here without a lot of effort and explaining, teaching began to go a lot smoother. When my lessons are a familiar style to those of the teacher, I find the children are a lot more focussed and behaviour is improved. This means I can be a lot more relaxed and have a more positive relationship with the students.
Monday was a bit of a random evening in the flat, it was one of the Chinese teacher's birthdays so we were getting ready to go out for dinner. I quickly ran down to use the bathroom, and being typical clumsy Caroline leant on the old sink hanging on the wall....SMASH!! The sink came tumbling down, making me jump out of my skin and a shard of it got stuck in my toe.. cue my first visit to Thai hospital to get bandaged up and supplied with half a pharmacy of antibiotics, pain relief etc... Never one to miss out on food, I jumped straight back on the bike from A&E and pedalled over (with toes hanging off the pedal) to the restaurant to meet the others.
We had a BBQ as they knew I was missing western food (sunday dinner pleeeeeeease), though this was like no BBQ I had ever seen. It was Korean style, and had a hot plate in the middle to cook the raw meat swimming in bowls of blood on the table, and round the edge was a section to pour in chicken stock (and egg...) to make a soup and cook vegetables in. Tasted good but the hygiene levels not worth thinking about - same chopsticks to put raw meat on and then eat the cooked from were the least of our worries... Anyway we had a good night! Happy Birthday Moon!!
