# 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!)