On Teaching and Thai Education...

7/10/09
I ended this week feeling a little less inspired and a little more discouraged. But only a little! I just feel so frustrated when I can't communicate to my students and when they excessively chat or goof around. I know they're young, but it's difficult to maintain a professional environment when I have 20 peeping eyes around the door of the UNSUPERVISED students not in my class. Today I needed help translating brother and sister into Thai so my 6 year olds could understand their homework to draw THEIR families. I do everything to the extreme and play two brill ant actresses, Teacher Deven and student Devy. I call on Devy and she says "Hello!". Devy doesn't talk when Teacher Deven is talking, ec. Devy has a high pitched voice and shrinks to about a 5 foot hunch. Whatever works, right? The hard thing about drawing the family was that the students didn't understand that MY (Devy's family) had 4 members (Me, Danny, Mom, and Dad). So all of their drawings looked like mine, even if Grandma lived in the house, Dad was missing, the student had a sister, etc. So I sought after help from a Thai teacher that could say the directions in Thai. Except that all 8classrooms in the elementary school building (there is a middle school building and this one) were full of kids and NO teachers. The students were either sitting there or messing around playing games. I was mortified. I finally found a teacher near the bathrooms and he came and helped, but explaining the directions to him was also an ordeal.

I gave a quiz to my 9 year olds on the ABC's. It was very simply with the letters A B C _ E etc and the students had to fill in the missing letters. I covered posters and removed all in-desk materials and spread them out to discourage cheating. Even so I still caught kids talking and helping each other. There are discrepancies within the class as well. For example,4 out of the 11 got 100% right, about 5 got 60% right and 1 girl got 40% right and was very lost. I struggle to challenge the more advanced students while not losing ones further behind. And then there are those who just don't care at all. These students stare blankly when I address them, don't do their homework, disturb class...

But there is a root to this problem.

I found out some interesting information about Thai education the other day. I'm at
the middle school/junior high, right? Well only 70-80 % of these kids
start 8th grade (high school) and it is extremely costly--over $1500
USD a year. For a farming family, this is not feasible. As Learning Enterprises volunteers, we came here with the intention of connecting kids to college students addition to intensive English, but of that 80% less than 10% can afford university.

It's tough too because many of the kids in this rural area Bangkratum know they aren't going to high school and it is hard to engage them in regular classes, let alone something difficult like English.

I will update with more later. Tomorrow (Saturday) I head South to Lop Buri with Aunt O for some tourism that apparently includes monkeys!
Monkey!-->