Students

When will I ever be greeted every single day at school by a swarm of students saying, " Hello Teacha, How are youuu?" and battling with each other over who gets to carry my teaching materials to the classroom? The amount of respect and excitement that I get from my students everyday has made being their english teacher an honor and a truly wonderful experience. Having students that really want to learn has made teaching that much more rewarding.

Throughout the year I viewed my job as the english teacher not only to teach english but to also widen my students cultural understanding of the world. Many of my students barely make it out of their 1 mile long village and they like most of the teachers have very little understanding of how the rest of the world functions. My ending unit with my students was Professions. As their last assignment I asked them "What do you want to be when you grow up?" This might seem like a question that gets asked to children quite often, but I don't know if my students have ever even thought about it. Most of them are without question suppose to follow in the foot steps of their parents and be a rice farmer, which is a perfectly admirable profession. So when I asked them their first response was, Farmer. Slowly as they thought about it one brave student would say, Police Man or Teacher. As soon as someone broke the ice their minds went wild but the majority settled on Teacher, Nurse, and Police Man. Although most of my students viewed this activity as a fun pretend assignment, I hope to have planted a small seed in their minds that they can do and be whatever they put their minds too.

Here is some of their work! (6th grade)

Recently in my classroom I made additions to my world map and put people from different countries around it and taped a string to where they are from. This has ignited a new curiosity. There now is usually a huddle of students pointing to the different people and tracing them back to a country. The student are most curious about the other asian looking people and where they are from. It's been exciting to watch them explore the world from my classroom!

#4 WorldTeach Family

Coming from all corners of the US, with different backgrounds and majors, this group of volunteers is what kept me sane for the year. Almost each one of us comes from a different state in the US: Florida, New York, Illinois, Colorado, New Jersey, Maine, Texas, and so on. With majors such as: English, Art History, Economics, Education, Psychology, Anthropology we brought the whole spectrum with some people never teaching a day in their lives and with others spending the past 20 years in the art of teaching. The one thing that surprised me the most about this group is how dedicated each one was to their students and schools. Everybody came here to teach and make a difference in any small or big way possible. After long days at school with each day bringing on a new set of challenges, weekend get-togethers to celebrate holidays, birthdays, try to cook american food, or just because were essential. We would empathize with each other about how we miss cheese, had to sit through a 3 hour long thai meeting, how to fend off ants, spiders and snakes, or just had a tiring day being a farang.

This past weekend it came time for our End of Service meeting where we said our goodbyes to those we wont see in Thailand again, reflect on the past year of teaching, and officially receive our TEFL (teaching english as a foreign language) certificates. As most things are here on out, you can't believe the day has arrived until it's practically over. The days are going by faster and faster and soon it'll be time to say bye to PlaPak Village and students. Today I brought out my suitcase that has been tucked away underneath my bed for the last year and begun to calculate how I will pack up!

#5 Roommates

ROOMMATES

Okay if you have been reading my blog you'll know that I've just skipped a few numbers in my tributes but I was a little ambitious trying to do 30 of these things. So, I will try to at least do the last 5 of these while wrapping up my last 2 weeks in PlaPak village.

This past friday marked my roommate's last day in Thailand before heading home 2 weeks early to start a graduate program in Washington D.C. The week has been full of good-bye dinners and a late night singing our hearts out to Karokee...what is a better way of leaving Thailand than stuffing your face with Thai food and singing? Nother the less it was sad to see the person who I've come home to after long days of teaching go. I was very lucky to have another American to live with the year and be able to talk fluently in english over our dinners after struggling through communicating in Thai all day. Over the course of the year we have been there for each other through the good and bad days, always listening pactiently to whatever crazy thing went down in the classroom. We became co-parents to our neighbors dog- Cha Dam (see post) and to a new litter of kittens, both sharing the love for animals. We both have a care-free attitude and trudged through living in a gecko-filled, ant swarmed, moldy, cob-webbed filled house just saying Mai Bpen Rai. I couldn't have asked for a better person to live with and help me through the year.

Along with Amanda I still have my Thai Roommate Pi Yok with me for these next 2 weeks. She also, couldn't have been a better roommate. She gives us our space when we need it but is always there for us cooking delicious dinners or buying us a cold drink on a hot day after school. Even though she speaks very little english she now says she can understand a lot of our conversations at dinner. We have become a nice family that I will greatly miss.

The principle of PlaPak Wit, me, and Amanda at a good-bye dinner in the city.

Saying goodbye at the bus station with the english teachers

#17 Holidays

Throughout the year I've gotten to enjoy and learn about many new Thai Holidays. It has been refreshing and interesting to be a part of them and also teach about American holiday traditions.

The most recent holiday celebrated was Wan Meh (mother's day). This turned out to be amongst my favorite holidays celebrated in Thailand. All the mothers were invited to school were the ceremony was held. The students sang serveral songs honoring their moms then each student wai'd and gave their mom a hug. It was very sweet and I could tell the students really love them.

Here are pictures of the Holidays (thai and American) throughout the year:

Mother's Day- Wai-ing to their moms

Teacher's Day (Wai Khru)

informally called Budda's Birthday - Lightening candels at That Phanom Temple

Songkran- Thai New Years- water fight in Chaing Mai

Valentine's Day- making hearts in English Class

New Years in Chang Khan

Christmas

The King's Birthday (Father's Day)

Thanksgiving hand turkeys

That Phanom- Making Merit and Fire Boat

# 18 Teaching

This post is to teaching in general. I studied child development in college which isn't the same as an education major but rather how children grow, develop, and learn-the science of it. What makes some learning environments better, how do you create developmentally appropriate curriculum, Why do children do this or that at a certain age, What are appropriate ways to talk and interact with children? These are some of the questions my courses explored. I've had a great year actually putting a lot of the theories that I studied into practice and seeing what held up and worked in a rural thailand esl classroom and what completely failed. This is one of my main reason for coming to Thailand. I had been a student for the majority of my life, faithfully attending classes and following directions and when I graduated I was ready to do something on my own. I definitely had to learn as I went with aspects that had to be tailored to specifically teaching ESL that my major did not cover such as how to teach reading, how to be 'the foreigner', and how explain directions to a lesson or game using almost no english. I'm glad though I had a lot of experience before coming to Thailand working with infants and toddlers mainly because it made me use to having the language barrier with my students..saying something and not expecting an answers or an answer that needed some piecing together.

This past weekend the other volunteers and I put on an english camp for 130 students for the high school and surrounding schools with the participants ranging from 6th grade to 9th.We had a blast. I was very happy 5 of my 6th grade students from both of my schools were invited to participate. It was a day and a half long event that started at 8am friday and lasted till 12pm saturday. It was the perfect event to have fun and be silly with the students and get them excited to study english. We sung songs so much our throats hurt, danced so much our legs ached, and laughed constantly at the 'bad boys' and lady boys of camp. It also provided the opportunity for the Thai high school teachers to gather techniques on how to teach english in a fun and engaging manner during our 8 different stations we had set up each focusing on different english materials. The subjects included: time, clothes, verbs, prepositions, dance, verb-to be, and a station to practice their performance for a night show. It more importantly gave me a fresh boost of energy and ideas to finish my last few weeks of teaching strong. I'm very lucky to have the other volunteer teachers this year to generate teaching ideas with, rant about the absurdities of the Thai school system, and their general camaraderie through out the year. So here's to a great year of teaching and learning!

Team Boy and Girl with the volunteers! (each group of students came up with a team name and chant such as: Team Diamond, Lemon, Boy and Girl, X-Zone, Sea Flower, Lovely, and Lucifer. ---all on their own!)

#19 Fresh Market

You'll know when you've entered a fresh market by the nauseating smell of raw pork and chicken neatly organized on tables with buckets of live fish sitting on the ground.Women will have their machetes in hand hacking away at a pig head or sorting through the intestines of the latest slaughter. When I first moved to Thailand I was shocked by the openness of the fresh market compared with the US where you aren't even allowed to see how the animals are killed. I was also shocked by how the meat lays out on tables for hours in the hot sun with the women having a contraption of a plastic bag attached to a stick swishing away flies. Along with the meats they have an incredible spread of fresh vegetables, herbs, spices, and fruits that are brought over from the local fields. Although I don't do any cooking in Thailand, since my Thai roommate so generously buys my food and cooks, I rarely actually get to purchase anything from the fresh market other than a piece of fruit for a snack. I do love walking through it looking at the latest fruits and vegetables that have come into season or the whatever strange fish or animal they have laying about. For example there was ant egg season and spread across tables where leaves with live ants and their eggs that you could scoop up and buy, quite a delicacy here.

There is nothing to hide in Thailand when it comes to food. Everything you buy and eat is killed and cooked right in front of you.

#20 Thai Competitions

One thing about Thai schools is that they love competitions. This can range anything from the week long sport competition we had in December to an academic spelling bee or writing competition. Today though, I experienced my first school cooking competition between local elementary schools. Of course it starts off as any normal event would for me having no idea what it is for, where we are going, and what we will be doing. I've learned that sooner or later in the event I'll figure it out or at least get the gist of it. My scheduled pick up time was 8:30am so naturally they arrive somewhere around 9 am with a truck load of students piled in the back of someones pick-up truck. I jump in and see what the day has in store for me.

My 6th grade students are some days in charge of preparing all the student and teacher lunches, so I was pretty confident in their cooking skills and would fare well in the competition. They got started right away chopping up vegetables and preparing the fire that the meal would be cooked by.

Of course there has to be some entertainment while the students are cooking so all the pre-school students were invited to have some sort of dance competition. Many of these little ones are my student's younger brothers and sisters. They basically stood up on stage swaying back and forth or even one group hula-hooped their way through a song while the adults stood and laughed at their cuteness.

The end product was a lemon-grass streamed fish topped with garlic and a side of laab (minced meat salad). I am amazed at their skills knowing that when I was in 6th grade the only thing I would make was boxed brownies or chocolate cookies. That brings me to my next point. Although I have many issues with how the thai school system works I think they do a wonderful job in teaching the students life skills and things that they will be using in everyday. For example PlaPak Noi school has a student run garden and rice field, fishing pond, and cooking lessons. 2 hours later the food was ready to be sampled by the judged and the verdict read. PlaPak Noi came in second place getting to take home a trophy and 1,500 baht! yahh. The students piled back in the truck and we are on our way back to school.

#21 Night Market

Night markets are definitely in the top ten things I love most about Thailand. Watching a mile long market unfold within a few hours slowly covering the street is quite amazing to witness. Then after a few hours open the vendors again slowly pack up their merchandise and the market vanishes again. The people do this EVERYDAY. If it is a food stand you can see them wheeling their cart over to the designated street or a clothes outlet where they first construct a wire rack then perfectly assemble the clothes. All to be taken down that same evening.

Night market food can be some of the cheapest and best options for a quick dinner. The variety of food is endless and you can pick up a dinner for about $1. In my village we have a small night market every wednesday night that brings everybody together as that nights dinner is picked up, peruse the clothes, or just to grab a bobo tea and socialize.

One of my favorite night markets is the Chaing Mai Sunday walking street market (pictures left). The hippi- style city produces a market filled with it's famous handi-crafts, art, and endless souvenirs for backpackers. I went there when my parents where visiting me in Thailand and if anyone knows my mom you can imagine the endless hours we spent at the markets driving my dad to retreat to the hotel room with a beer.

Pla Pak Wednesday Night market (below)

**Pictures by Jackie :)

#22 Fruit

Hands down Thailand has some amazing fruit! Fresh fruit carts line almost any street you walk down making a cold, sliced mango or watermelon a perfect snack on a hot day. Throughout the year I was introduced to many fruits I had never seen before as they came into season. Here are some of my favorites:

Dragon Fruit, the most unique looking of all the fruits, has a rather bland but refreshing flavor. Maybe a cousin to a Kiwi.

On the far right we have rose apples, which in my mind taste exactly like their name. Crunchy like an apple but with a subtle sweet rose flavor. In the middle, one of my favorites from the states and Thailand, Mangos. Top left: Dragon fruit again and Far Left: classic oranges.

Yummy classics Bananas and Watermelon!

Pictures taken from Kerry because I'm too lazy to take my own pictures..

I ate these for weeks, Rambutans! They are a spiky soft round fruit with an egg-like center. The fruit is very sweet and I can devour a bag within minutes. The only nuisance is an almond shaped seed in the middle that Kerry describes perfectly as a "wood chip" since the shell of it peels off when you try to take it out tasting similar to a wood piece.

These might be my favorite fruit in Thailand, Mangosteen. They came into season a few months ago and have now past..sad! They have a doily type top and thick outer shell. The middle contains a soft sweet fruit with a few big seeds. Unlike the states fruit is only available when it is season and most of it grown in a field next to where they sell it.

Fresh and delicious Arroy Mak Mak!!

**other fruits not pictures but are worthy of mention: Guava in thai called Farang (the name they use for foreigners), Tarmarind- similar to a dried apricot and the fruit that just came into season full force Longan a small ball shaped fruit. .