There have been a lot of inquiries about the everyday stuff- What is it like to be a teacher in Thailand? What do you do with yourself Monday through Friday (and sometimes Saturday, blah.) Lately, in correspondence, this has been the second most popular question. What is the number one question, you ask? “What do they do to celebrate Thanksgiving in Thailand?” Now, if you’ve found yourself wondering this same question, let me save you the embarrassment and save myself the trouble of having to make fun of you in the office tomorrow morning. They don’t do anything. Thanksgiving is celebrated by Americans in America. You don’t hear us asking what you did for Loy Krathong do you?
Now, back to the topic at hand…the following is an outline of a typical workday:
6:45am: Mac awakens to the sound of tuk-tuk and moto-cy horns blaring at barking, mangy dogs playing in traffic. 7:49am: Knowing the impending arrival of Mac at her door, Keeks manages to drag herself out of bed. The dogs are no longer barking—they’ve either retreated from the already scorching sun, or did not survive their mid-road play date. (Don’t feel badly—it’s simply natural selection, Thai style.) Monday through Thursday, we begin our workday at 8:50. While it’s only a 10-minute walk to the entrance closest to our apartment, this gate closes at 8:30 am so we must leave by 8:15 to avoid having to walk halfway around the 120-acre campus. (That particular excursion would draw a lot of stares, as Thais can’t even imagine going from the office to the canteen on foot.) Classes are broken up into seven, 50-minute periods. In any one day we teach for between one and four hours, giving us a chance to see three classes for each a total of five hours a week. We work in the lower secondary department, Mathayom One, Two, and Three, which is the equivalent of eighth, ninth, and tenth grades for you Yanks. Twice a week the classes come in two-hour blocks (see Webster’s definition of ‘pure hell’ for further information). There aren’t many things we like to do for two hours at a time that don’t involve a ball and a net, and the following typical conversation certainly doesn’t fall into that category:
“Please turn your book to page 66. Sit down, Bright. Yes, now! Zen, are you going to turn in any homework this term? Q, what is the answer to number two? Q? Q? I’m sorry, what is your nickname today? ‘Fly a kite’ is not an example of a food. Off, wake up. Art, stop giving Up a massage. Game, I hear your answer—I can’t hear anything else but your screaming answer.” And that’s just the first five minutes.
In all fairness, the boys are great. Take away the fact that they are teenage boys and are naturally rambunctious, distracted, and obsessed with all things sexual (‘fly a kite’ is Thai slang for masturbation and Kiki has actually had to bar it from the classroom as it was the response to any form of the questions “what are you doing,” “what do you like to do,” etc.) the kids are wonderful students. Their English level is beyond anything we expected, and they are very studious when you tell them something is worth ten marks towards their grade. Our favorite defense against a student not paying attention is actually his peers. When asking for an answer from a student who doesn’t know our place in the book, the other students will either tell him the wrong paragraph or give him the wrong answer just so that we can all laugh at the absurdity of his response. In the Special English Program in which we teach, class sizes are small and tuition is expensive, so students are relatively responsible to come prepared to learn.
The best part of the day is lunch. It’s food, ‘nuff said. This is especially true when they serve ‘icy surprise’ for dessert, a sweet concoction made from coconut milk and purple noodles that look like the bacteria we studied under a microscope in Biology, and made cold by scoops of ice.
We garner the privilege of coming to school an hour later than other teachers because we teach an extra period after school for primary students. You may have heard of it—it’s called ETE, an acronym that roughly translates to My Worst Nightmare. In the words of someone very close to us, “it’s like digging out my eyeballs with a spoon.” These children have a short enough attention span with activities in their own language, let alone in a class after school and taught entirely in English. We’ve quickly learned the power of Yugi-oh stickers as bribes for finishing worksheets.
Our saving grace comes Friday when we trade an extra hour in the morning for an afternoon without the ETE devils. After school we keep ourselves busy before dinner, which isn’t difficult when it takes 25 minutes to walk anywhere. We’ve recently acquired a volleyball from the PE department, or we enjoy going to the health park with our Frisbee or to join in the evening aerobics class, preferably when the energetic lady-boy is leading. After visiting one of the food stalls on the walk back home, Keeks whips Mac’s butt at a round of cards and then we go to bed to the sounds of twenty stray dogs locked in territorial fights.
We may give a lot of hype about the stuff we deal with every day, but we still wake up every morning happy to be in Thailand, which speaks volumes about this amazing experience. And our blogs wouldn’t be so entertaining if we weren’t that dramatic.
