So after a weekend of travelling and settling in we were up bright and early for our first experience of real teaching. We had been told that these 2weeeks of teaching would be supervised, but turned out they weren't. But this was fine as we were all in pairs so we could help each other out. We were told to be ready for half 8 on Saturday but apparently this had changed come Sunday night when people started saying that we had to be ready for 8. So come 8 Monday morning and everyone is up, shattered, but all looking very smart, everyone scrubs up pretty well apparently. When you're use to seeing people in shorts and t-shirt, bikini's or just general beach clothes its quite strange seeing them all in proper smart teaching clothes. So come 8:10 and the Songtaow (not Songta as I previously thought in the last post) finally turns up, we all hop on to a rather cramped Songtaow as there are about 18 of us and they usually carry about 12, but we manage. So we turn up to this school, not really knowing what to expect, and having prepared lessons for basic to intermediate level, we were shocked when we got into class and they were incredibly advanced. Over the four days of teaching at this school we found out that this was one of the best schools in Hat Yai, it was the equivalent to a grammar school back home where you have to pass an exam to get in. While at this school we got into the mindset that most students were going to be this advanced, which is not true at all. As we found out the second week of teaching practice. But back to the advanced school, while teaching there the kids were moaning that our topics were too easy, so missing English food we decided to teach that as a topic. Which paid off as they seemed to find it a bit more difficult, but making the flashcards showing the food the night before made me into a dribbling wreck. I've never wanted fish and chips more in my life. At the end of the lesson we got them to draw their favourite English food, and answer a few questions. One of the questions was whether or not they thought English food was healthy or unhealthy, there were mixed answers. Many of them thought that English food looked healthy because there is a good mixture of meat and veg, this made me and Kaley laugh as we obviously know different. But there was one girl who put the same as the rest, but then put that she thought some of it looked unhealthy as it was high in cholesterol because it was fried. 'High in Cholesterol' what the hell, I can't even spell cholesterol with out the help of spellcheck, this 14 year old Thai girl knew more English then I do. Another class used the topic of politics, and got the class to vote for a class president, and make a speech on why they should be class president, and one of the kids said that people should vote for him because he was diligent. I don't even know what diligent means. We were all very grateful when we found out that we had Friday off because it was a Buddhist holiday, a celebration of vegetarianism. So we decided to show our support by getting rather drunk, on both Thursday and Friday night. Thursday night we had our first experience of a Thai nightclub, in Thailand they don't seem to have invented dance floors yet, so we had to improvise, seeing a small open space I led the way and shocked a few Thais with my amazing dance moves.
So this was our first experience of teaching and we all slipped into the mindset that this is what it was going to be like in all the schools.
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