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[charliecambodia-blog]

I am going to miss these guys too much!

[teflgermany]

What’s it really like on the LoveTEFL Thailand Internship?

I am sat on the porch of what is probably the most expensive beach resort I will ever stay in. The sea is literally on my doorstep. The sand is like white powder, the sea is turquoise blue, and our room has bath robes… This morning we said goodbye to our schools, cleared up our humble house, and in the space of a few hours, went from one extreme to another. Now it’s time to chill out and enjoy the time we have left together on the beach. I have gone through so much in the past 2 months that on one hand, arriving at school feels like a life time ago, but on the other, the end has come around so quickly. Such is life. The bonds I made- with our teacher, the children, but especially with the other interns- have ended up becoming so strong that time scales don’t even relate. Sharing this experience with others is what really made it for me. Now that it has come to an end I cannot bare to say goodbye to the friends I’ve made.

‘Bucket’ cocktails with the interns in Bangkok

  I feel like it’s expected of me to say that the thing I will miss most about this is the children… but I have never had much patience with kids and I still don’t! Don’t get me wrong, there were a few individuals I really connected with and it was great feeling to teach and be looked up to. But it is definitely not my calling in life. The thing I will miss most about the internship is not feeling like a tourist in Thailand. I will miss the town I have got to know so well, I will miss feeling like an accepted part of a community, and it is only now that I am leaving that I realise how lucky I have been and how beautiful this small place is. In the time I have been here, I established a routine that made me feel at home, which was so welcome after being on the road so long. I will miss running and doing aerobics in our park with the rest of the locals. I will miss the night market on Wednesdays where I got the best Som Tam and mango sticky rice. I will miss having a place to call my own and not having to pack up my things every other night to move on. And, of course, my bank account will miss the local prices.

Just look at it! Bangkok from the golden mount

  The best advice I could give someone considering doing this internship is to do your research and know that your expectations need to be flexible. Not many people in my group had issues- but the ones that did had either been misinformed by a third party company or weren’t clear on what they were buying. This is not a volunteer programme. LoveTEFL is a tour company and the money you give them goes to them, not the school- a fact that came as quite a shock to some people. The school, and the teachers looking after you do not get any outside support towards the accommodation they provide, the electricity you use or the food they feel the obligation to give you. For some this might be a deal breaker, but there are pros for doing this through a company- the biggest being having others around you- and it is an issue you can easily take into your owns hands by setting up an online charity page for your school so you can give back to them at the end.

Cooking with our teacher’s mum

When it came to the actual teaching, the level of English I experienced was so low that it was easy to pick things up as I went along. The best idea I had was getting each of my classes to make English name tags in my first lesson with them (nick names spelt in English, that is – Thai names tend to be extremely long and hard to pronounce) which enabled me to learn names and engage with the kids inside and outside of the class room.

  Another thing to be aware of is that with things like this, especially in a country such as Thailand, is that expectations often get thrown out the window. The only thing that lived up to the expectations I had at the beginning of the internship is the nature of children. Always excited, always wanting to say hello and high five, always covered in dirt and absolutely in love with us. With everything else, it was just better not to have any preconceptions, to live in the moment and make the most of whatever I was faced with. Even written plans like a bus or the school timetable were subject to last minute changes. Don’t expect the bus to be there when it says it will be, just get to the stop and hope for the best. You might be waiting an hour, but you’ll get there eventually. There will be days when you go to class to find it empty, (after having spent the last 3 hours preparing your lesson) because the children are doing something else instead and no one had thought to inform you it was cancelled. It’s frustrating, but that’s just what Thailand is like. The first couple of weeks, this kind of thing really got to me, but by the end, I had learned to shrug it off.

A trip to Wat Tham Suea with our teacher

  So you can obviously go and procure a teaching position abroad on your own, but there are a few obvious pros of doing it through a TEFL company. Firstly it means you have an in-country team who are responsible for you, “go-to” people when something is wrong or when you need a liaison with the school to sort out any issues. The internships are temporary- “taster” programmes that are supposed to give you an introduction into teaching abroad. Having completed it, I am qualified and confident that I would be able to handle the challenge of a real teaching placement if I ever wanted one. Generally speaking, the impact that English speaking interns have on the students is obvious. Schools have regular meetings with the LoveTEFL team and choose to be involved in the programme because of the positive results it has had on both the children’s and teachers English skills. Every term a new group of interns will arrive to motivate and inspire children to learn English just by being present.

Some of my grade 3 and 4’s

Outside of teaching, I will miss the people that I have shared this experience with. Above all, there are a bunch of other people doing this with you. You are not just diving into another culture on your own, there’s a bunch of people in the same boat as you that you can relate to when things get hard. We have been able to support each other, we have laughed and cried together. I have got to know an incredible bunch of people- of all ages and from all over the world- that I never would have if I hadn’t done this, and I am so thankful for it.

  My only real criticism regarding the internship is the lack of actual teaching. It was made very clear during orientation that this wasn’t a guided experience and that we would be thrown straight into it, which made me think I would have my plate full. But after the first week of lessons, I found myself having nothing to do simply because I was not given enough hours of lessons. While other interns were teaching 15 hours a week, I was sharing 8 hours with my partner. We would mix the lessons up so we were teaching classes together, but it was no where near enough to keep us occupied throughout the day, and no where close to a true representation of what teaching is actually like. Our host English teacher would be teaching an average of 6 hours worth of lessons per day while we spent most our time in the office. When we suggested assisting, or just sitting in on her lessons it felt like we were intruding. As I said at the beginning of my posts, every placement has its differences, it’s individual pros and cons.

View from our teacher’s garden

Everything else at my school aside from this aspect was wonderful- the accommodation, the teacher, the location… It is just a shame that LoveTEFL didn’t work with the school to ensure we were assigned a sufficient amount of hours. When we were actually teaching, it was the highlight of the day, the best thing in the world. But this was so few and far between that I would often wonder what the point of me being there was.

  It’s a mixed bag, but an experience that I will cherish for life and something I am glad I have done. I have learned lots of new things in Thailand; not to take things too seriously, to take things as they come and make the most of what I have. I can now check off teaching from my possible career paths, but know that it is an option open to me if I ever wanted to teach abroad. For now, two months was enough for me and I am looking forward to continuing my travels. I have made great memories with the interns I shared this experience with and owe a massive thank you to the English teacher who looked after us. Chokh di! 

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[teflgermany]

A day in the life: teaching in Kanchanaburi

School in Thailand is a lot different to school in England. The day starts with an alarm and several traditional songs about the King that are played out of speakers around the grounds. The children begin to arrive as early as 6:30am to “clean”, but mostly they play around while pretending to sweep leaves around the floor. At 8am, the whole school stands to attention on the field, sings the national anthem, raises the flag, blesses the Buddha and chants the school mottos. One teacher or another will give a speech on being good and give announcements, the younger grades “wai” the older grades and the teachers then they will all shout their times tables while doing a karate routine.

Raising the flag at school, part of usual morning rituals across most schools in Thailand

Classes start at 8:30, but it seems to be an unspoken rule that teachers arrive 10 minutes after the children do. I am scheduled to teach two classes a day, grades 3-6 Monday to Thursday with the other intern, and do a twenty minute kindergarten class on Friday. The more effort we put in to making the classes fun, the more we get out of the students. Our primary focus is to get the children speaking in English as much as possible. If at the end of the lesson, we have taught the children to say one new thing in English, it is judged as successful. We have lunch at 11:30, which as a vegetarian is usually quite tough. I can count on rice, some vegetables retrieved from a pork dish and fresh fruit at the very least. We finish at 3:30pm, chill out, play with the children, go into town, run in the park and meet up with other interns for dinner. We spend a lot of evenings with our incredible English teacher who lives across the way from us too.

Puppies in the playground

I’ve seen the children doing a number of things that would be illegal in England. Like making fires to burn rubbish on school grounds unattended, sharing their lunch with the puppies that sleep next to the canteen and jumping into the pond the retrieve a football when they should be in class. One time a girl fell from the second floor window (apparently an attempt to save her work blown away in the wind) but it was okay because she fell on a banana tree. Only in Thailand. To think that I was concerned about giving year 3s permanent markers to write their name tags with! I know that not all schools in Thailand will be like this, and that our state funded local primary school may not be the best, but I will definitely look back on it and laugh.

The view from the end of our house

The attitude towards teaching is extremely laid back. Me and my fellow intern are always ready on the dot to start teaching, but we realised pretty early on that the pace of doing things here (if they ever get done at all!) is very slow. If we don’t have a class we will be in the office planning for the next one, which now takes no time at all, and is even more basic than what we were taught on the TEFL course. Children can be very naughty and corporal punishment is still used; I think our teachers are sensitive to us when it comes to this though. The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve only seen our English teacher hit a grade 6 boy once with a stick. She apologised to me straight after she did it. I’ve had lessons that have been put on “pause” while the kids all eat ice creams, and I’ve had morning lessons cancelled because the class didn’t clean their assigned area well enough before assembly.

Our student Poy and her crew

Actually the few classes I have are cancelled quite often, which is a real shame because I don’t feel that I am doing as much as I could here. I do not feel like I am getting a realistic insight into teaching and the students aren’t getting as much as they could out of me. I have felt like a bit of a burden to the school at times, when I came here expecting to be cherished. But as I’ve said, it is the luck of the draw. Some interns are in secondary schools with 1,500 students and teach upwards of 15 hours a week as individuals, but in my small school the teachers don’t seem to want to give their lessons away when we ask if it is possible to have more. It even feels like I’m stepping on their territory when I ask if I can just sit in on their lessons for want of something to do. It is very un-Thai to deny someone something straight out or talk matter of factly, so it is hard to tell what the teachers feelings are towards us being here. Like mine I think they are mixed but not directed personally. At this point in the internship, I am feeling disillusioned with the teaching, but keeping open minded. Sabai sabai.

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[teflgermany]

Thailand internship: My final week!

So here we are, the last week. Hard to believe? I certainly can’t! To think a matter of weeks ago I was rushing around working every hour under the sun in order to meet the cost of getting here and now the experience at Watnak School is rapidly coming to an end. Although the time may have flown by, the experience has been one of a kind and the memories will last forever.

I have been traveling before, I eat spicy food every day and I have experienced ‘lesser developed areas’ in my life before but this experience has opened my eyes to how rich and comfortable we really are on a daily basis. Some of the biggest challenges have been our living circumstances, the huge shift in cultural lifestyle and the physical journey my body has endured. As some of you know my ‘weak as a piece of cotton’ British stomach surrendered to Thai food pretty quickly, almost instantly actually, this was to be challenge number 1 and they just kept on coming.

Upon arrival we are greeted with a soft landing in a nice hotel to recover from the jet lag, to try and cope with abundance of new faces and learn all about the months ahead. After a pleasant 48 hours we were divided up and sent off to our schools. Once you head off the tourist track and into everyday Thai life the real culture shock sinks in. (apart from me, I was still in bed poorly sick at this point, typical!). I am not one for snobbery in the slightest, as long as I have somewhere to lay my head I’m a happy gal – but – I have to say; laying my head down on the pillow to see a lizard running above my head was a shock at first. Lizards are harmless and are actually quite cute but they are not something I am used during my nighttime routine. Our accommodation is modest and is provided graciously by the school, they have done the best they can and that is all we can ask for. As time went on I actually began to relax around the lizards and even named our resident pal Sebastian. As time passed I started to appreciate living with the lizards because they are of use; they eat the mosquitos, cockroaches and goodness knows what else is roaming around, this was a massive help. One can start to see the connection between living things and how each creature has a place and a job to do every day.

Our school accommodates roughly 600 children each day and there is so much to do with a very tight budget; including the school lunches. The lunch ladies do amazingly well to provide every child with a free school meal of a decent portion and now they have an extra four stomachs to provide for which adds to their daily challenge. Most of the food was palatable but sometimes I just couldn’t face the chicken feet, it was a step to far!. There are shops in the town, they are a 25 minute walk away at least, and that journey includes the obligatory encounter with the edgy dogs that live along the route who try to have my ankles for their own lunch. These shops and stalls are packed with all sorts of Thai delicacies I wouldn’t even be able to begin to pronounce. I have tried everything with an open mind and an equally open mouth but some my body, or stomach, just couldn’t endure. It’s the beginning of the summer season here so a sweaty face is my constant state, any food we eat we sweat off almost instantaneously. This leads to extremely quick weight loss and a constant hungry tummy. When the weekend arrives and we travel further afield and I’m not sure what we spend more time doing: exploring or eating

These are just a couple of examples amongst a myriad of experiences. Watching the school children every day knowing they have so little but seeing them be so happy has been a lesson in itself. Having most luxuries stripped away, and by luxuries I do not mean argon oil facemasks and a bowl of quinoa, I count my luxuries as being able to get into a bed without climbing into a mosquito net, I count my luxuries as having an actual cold shower, not just a bucket of water to pour over yourself like most of the village, I count my luxuries as being able to drink water out of the tap for free knowing its safe. Having what I took for granted, but soon realized were luxuries taken away has taught me how to value the smallest of things. I have learned how to be happy without much of what I thought were luxuries, just like the school children here at Watnak. I think I can now truly reappraise what I believe to be a luxury. There is so much more to life than stressing over what to wear this Saturday, what Julie said to Margret at work about Janet or how many likes you have on Instagram, I have reassessed what is important during my time here.

Each experience has pushed me ever so slightly. Whether it be mentally or physically it has added up bit by bit to be one of the best experiences I have ever had. I will be sad to say goodbye to the children, my new lizard pal Sebastian and the Thai teachers who have looked after us with such kindness. I wish everyone could spend a period of their lives in a school such as this to truly put what it is important into perspective. The world would be for certain a better place.

Oscar Wilde is quoted as saying “experience is the name everybody gives to their mistakes” . Yes we must and will gain much of our life experience in that way but I would urge anybody thinking of doing this as being a really positive way of gaining valuable and life changing experience in a positive way.

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[teflgermany]

Seaside Sihanoukville: relaxing by the beach

Teaching had sadly come to an end but a much deserved ‘holiday’ awaited us. We travelled to Sihanoukville, a popular tourist destination on the south coast. It felt great to get away from the craziness of Phnom Penh and chill out a bit. We had five days here so we were all ready to do some snorkelling and visit Koh Rong by boat. An island tourists rave about.

The snorkelling trip started us off, all of the interns hiring a tour guide to take us around three islands for a full day out at sea where we stopped off at a secluded beach for lunch with water that was amazingly still and clear. Whilst snorkelling we caught sight of some interesting coral reefs which were home to an octopus and crab that we were all crowding around to see.

It’s definitely a place where you could sit on the beaches all day sipping on Angkor beer or $2 cocktails and a whole day will just breeze by. After living in the hubbub of Phnom Penh and the travelling around the country at weekends, we were all thankful for the reprieve and did little but eat amazing sea food and dip in and out of the sea. Sihanoukville has a crazy strip on the beach which was good for saying our drunken and emotional goodbye’s to fellow interns. A wonderful local sea food BBQ was arranged to celebrate surviving the internship run by the brilliant Kimlay. Absolutely everyone had an incredible time teaching out here, and a few of us are going to teach elsewhere around the world or carrying on travelling through SE Asia. If you feel like you need to get out of your comfort zone and want to truly experience the Khmer way of life, then come and teach in Cambodia.

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[teflgermany]

Intern life & our house in Kanchanaburi

I am currently sitting in my new home for the next 2 months. It’s a Thai style house with a concrete downstairs, which comprises of an open space with a sofa, fridge, microwave, work desk, television and bathroom. The wooden upstairs has a dressing room complete with an iron and ironing board, a landing area for drying clothes and the bedroom. I have definitely had the luck of the draw when it comes to accommodation. Facilities vary from school to school. It is important to be open minded and prepared to experience a lower standard of living than you are used to. Some interns have a spare classroom in the school with a bed shoved in it and a shared bathroom a few floors down; others have a renovated school clinic that is “western standard” in terms of structure but uncomfortable in terms of homeliness.

Our intern house

Some have washing machines, some have microwaves, and some have no living facilities what so ever. The only guarantee is a western toilet (as opposed to a squat), which seemed to be people’s biggest concern. At the end of the day, you just have to make do with whatever you end up with and remember that the school has paid out of their own pocket to provide you with this living space and everything in it. You have to expect to be uncomfortable at times; to endure stomach upset, cold showers and hard beds. And this can all be quite a shock for interns coming straight from Europe. But this is all part of the experience. I am living in Thailand and I live like Thais do. I am experiencing the culture at a more realistic level than other tourists. I am eating and sleeping like the other teachers do.

The general every day attitude towards life is a lot different to England. It’s quite a hard thing to explain. Thais are generally quite laid back. Things only seem serious when it comes to respecting elders and upholding traditions. Everything else is slow, no one is ever in a rush to do anything and everything is subject to change. It’s probably the heat. One thing that was said over and over at orientation was that every single person in our local school area will know who we are. This wasn’t an exaggeration. Although Thailand in general is quite touristy, the TEFL schools are in small, quiet communities, often out in the sticks and cut off from everything else. For the first couple of weeks, walking down the street was a funny ordeal. Sometimes I got looks of respectful recognition and sometimes I got a curious, even distrustful eyeing up that seemed to say “what are you doing here!”. To some people, foreigners are a bit of a novelty because they never see them. They will want to take pictures of you and talk to you no matter how limited their English is.

Teacher’s garden at the TEFL intern house in Kanchanaburi, Thailand

It’s such a small community that every time I leave the school I am bound to run in to a student with his or her parents. Being respectful and following their social norms goes without saying, and if you play things right you might be rewarded. One day I went to buy some shorts from a local shop. After a friendly chat with the owner, in which we told him we were teaching English at the local school and that we were on our way into town to meet other interns, I ended up paying half price and he gave us a lift to town. Almost every day, my partner plays football after school with the kids while parents watch. One of the parents, touched by his involvement, gave him a big packet of Emmental cheese to put in the fridge (cheese is hard to find here, she had great intuition). We have been treated to a free massage from a teacher who owns a salon. We have even visited our English teacher’s mum and step dad for dinner, at which we were utterly spoiled and given bag-fulls of food to take home with us. This communal togetherness that we are being included in is central to Thai culture. Everyone here knows each other, shares what they can and looks out for one another like a big, happy family. We don’t have that in London.

If I had to tell you the “thorn in my side” about living here it would be the noise at night. It might sound like a gross exaggeration but I have a more peaceful night’s sleep in a dorm room on Khao San Road than I do in my room in Tha Muang, Kanchanaburi. If it isn’t every dog (there’s a lot of dogs) in the neighbourhood keeping me awake with their constant, relentless barking and howling, it’s the incessant whoop of a Koel bird that seems to nest directly above my head. But living here isn’t to say that I am completely cut off from the comforts of home. We are lucky to have a bus stop at the top of our road so we are conveniently connected to both Kanchanaburi town and Bangkok.

Waterfalls at Erawan National Park

I am away somewhere almost every weekend with the other interns (there’s a total of 30 in Kanchan) who often choose to stay in a tourist hub where restaurant menus are familiar (in English) and serve western food, where the showers are hot and the wifi actually works. The interns have managed to do it all, from touring the provinces’ famous “death railway” (The Burmese railway), river Kwae and waterfalls at Erawan National Park to flying to Koh Phangan for the full moon party, from the lady boys show, tuk-tuk drag races and Chinese New Year in Bangkok to chilling on the beach drinking coconuts at Hua Hin. The weekends are usually so eventful that by Sunday night we welcome another “quiet” week at school.

Watching the Ladyboys of Bangkok

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[teflgermany]

Kung fu and culture: wrapping up my China Internship

In my final blog of China I want to give a quick review over everything I’ve experienced while here, or at least enough to hopefully convince you that you should definitely make the decision to come here. You think it’s expensive, I know you do, part of you thinks you should wait until you have more money. If you are clever and get into the whole ‘China’ thing you could probably live here, hyperbolically, for about a pound. I am a lazy, cynical, anti-social, frequently miserable, unadventurous arse, pretty much all of the time, so if you would score higher on a personality test than me you can only enjoy this place more than I have.

I finally, after what feels exactly like :

a)no time at all and

b)my entire existence

have completed my Chinese English Teaching Internship. I have ended up really missing the kids I was teaching already and at least one or two of the staff at the school I will never forget. Sure I had to develop some pretty manipulative techniques to trick the kids into speaking exclusively in English but who doesn’t love a little bit of power. There was also the downside of dealing with a few fellow teachers who seemed to learn how to be human from watching robots learning to speak, this meant they sometimes treated me more like a pet than a colleague. They would be bringing me food, petting my head, showing me off to friends, tying me to a lamp post, taking me outside to pee, and striking me with a stick if I found my self humping the leg of a stranger. Of course all was forgiven with a scratch behind the ear and a belly rub. A belly, which they were very ready to remind me, had got larger since I had arrived.

I studied Chinese in the school I was working in and and therefore learned, from a student’s perspective, how frustrating it can be when a teacher doesn’t understand that today just isn’t a day for learning. I also understand how within the confines of this education system that that doesn’t matter and I am a terrible student. Teaching has taught me a lot about what it feels like to be a student including how much of a pain in the ass I was and continue to be to my own teachers. No longer do I feel I am suffering at the hands of a malevolent teacher like some sort’ve Sith Lord, instead more likely a caring teacher who saw the best in me and was frustrated by my lack of self discipline.

Aside from the teaching I spent just shy of a month up a mountain in -17 degrees weather learning kung fu. I would get up at 6.15 every morning and train until 6pm. The training was great fun and something that is available almost anywhere in China through websites like studymartialarts.org. I lost a tremendous amount of weight (mainly because 3 of my limbs shattered and fell off like a Sub-Zero fatality in Mortal Kombat), and I really immersed myself in Chinese culture. I learned a lot but the thing that will stay with me is that in -17 degrees it is possible for a lithium battery to freeze, making it impossible to charge my phone, iPad or macbook.

I also got the opportunity to visit the Shaolin Temple with a friend in Luoyang just prior to my kung fu experience. She was very generous, giving me somewhere to stay, taking me to see the Shaolin Temple and even giving me a fever with a temperature of about 40 degrees, completely paralysing me for a solid week into my training. This disease then infected the entire school, making me patient zero in what I suspected was the beginning of a kung-fu zombie movie I was now trapped in. It was worth it to see the temple and the other beautiful sights down there though.

I have developed a strong love for Beijing and the surrounding areas, I am more heartbroken going home than I was leaving home behind. Things don’t work over here in the same way as they do anywhere in the world, and in many ways they shouldn’t work at all. The only thing stopping constant car crashes in Beijing, for example, seems to be a science fiction esque Hive Mind shared by every one on the roads.

When it comes to loving this place I don’t know whether it’s the job, my friends, the Chinese people, the culture or whatever, but China is a place that needs to lived in. At least until you can push through the discomfort of culture shock into feeling at home. The first blog I wrote about this was a tremendously self indulgent rambling on how homesick I was, and even after going up a mountain for a month I felt like I missed Beijing more than any quantifiable graph or chart could explain. So after six months of being here I feel like the time has flown in, as often with these kinds of things the days could be very long but the months were far too short.

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[teflgermany]

Arriving to teach English at school in Kanchanaburi

It makes me laugh to think how nervous I was on the way to my school. It was that uncontrollable human instinct to fear of the unknown that stirs in the bottom of your stomach. Like jumping into deep water when you can’t see below the surface. I arrived to be instantly mobbed by children, who all wanted to shake my hand, give me a high five and introduce themselves at once. It definitely felt like the kids had been eagerly awaiting our arrival.

Our student Poy and her crew

It was all pretty overwhelming at first, but then you just have to think back to when you were that age, so full of energy and so enthusiastic about new things, and remember they’re only children! There was really nothing to be afraid of. On that first day, we were just shown around our on-campus accommodation and parts of the school building (we literally couldn’t take 2 steps without being crowded by children), and attempted to ask the TEFL representative the 101 questions in our minds before they left us there.

Morning assembly

  My assigned school is Wat Sriloha (Wat meaning temple, where the school was originally housed) a primary school and kindergarten, with a total of 450 students aged 3-13. It is situated in the small town of Tha Muang on the Mae Klong river, a 20 minute bus drive from Kanchanaburi Town, 2 hours away from Bangkok and walking distance from the interns at the next school along. Regarding what we actually teach, we were pleasantly surprised to be given course books and given the freedom to follow the units as closely or loosely as we liked. The timetable looked sparse in comparison to what I was expecting. Two lessons a day between two interns plus a couple of twenty minute kindergarten activities meant sharing eight hours of teaching a week – very short of the “10-14 hours at least” we were promised at the orientation. But, it being the first week, we guessed we were being eased into things and hoped we could ask for more lessons once we were settled.

Some of my grade 3 and 4’s

We are very lucky to have an incredible English teacher at our school. Her name is Pare and contrary to what we were told, her English is brilliant. She is a peer that I can look up to and relate to. She helped us out a lot the first couple of weeks, making sure we were comfortable and had everything we needed. We are both so grateful to have her. The first day “teaching”, my partner intern and I sat in on her lessons- observing and helping with pronunciation. We spent the rest of the day planning our first ever lesson. It takes Pare twenty minutes to plan an hour lesson… it took us 3 hours!

Our little blue house on the school grounds

She showed us around our local area in the evening – took us through the markets and to eat at a local cafe. Walking around, I realised that I really was in Thailand. Not tourist hot-spot, everything-ready-for-you-on-a-plate-in-English Thailand, but actual Thailand, where absolutely everything is in Thai and hardly anyone speaks English. I wondered how on earth we would be able to go out to eat (or do anything for that matter) without Pare’s help.

At the market

After my first week teaching, I felt encouraged and relieved. Things had gone well and the excitement of the students broke the ice when it came to teaching for the first time. The level of English was a lot lower than I expected and the pace of the lessons had to be quite slow. My partner and I worked as a team, taking it in turns to lead activities and when it was clear something wasn’t working, we adjusted our plan and tried something else. Although I imagined I would have more of an independent experience, teaching with my partner was beneficial when it came to putting things into practice.

Lesson planning in the office

When he was teaching, I could see what worked or didn’t work, and vice versa. We made sure we took it in turns to go first to make things equal, and helped out when the other was leading the class. When we met up with the others during our first week, it was clear that every school has a different way of doing things. Some interns were thrown straight in with loads of hours and no guidance; others were only teaching twenty minute portions of a teacher’s class where they were told what to do. Some were teaching as a pair, others were assigned individual year groups. I think we had it pretty good.

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