travel to Teach

Eating bugs, hanging out by the pool or trying to figure out how to use the bathroom was all good fun...but the main reason I was there was to teach. I was assigned to a school called Udon Thani Business College for Tourism and Administration (C-BAT), and it was located in between Nong Khai and Udon Thani, a city about twice the size of Nong Khai about an hour away.

The school had about 900 students in ages 17-21, most of them girls. At first I felt a bit insecure and intimidated about the whole thing and wished I had requested to teach primary school or really small kids instead of not making any requests at all, but that quickly changed and now I actually prefer teaching older students. The first week of teaching I was accompanied by another volunteer who had been at that school for almost two months. That helped a lot as far as getting to know the school and the way things worked around there.

The first thing that caught my eye was the students behavior towards the teachers. I guess problems with discipline in schools is a common problem in many countries, but not in Thailand. They would actually bow to us even in the hallway or cafeteria and sometimes even bend their knees so that they wouldn't be taller than any of the teachers when standing next to , or passing them. That didn't happen to me a lot, even though I'm no giant I'm still a head higher than most thai people, especially girls. The reason for this was not only the general politeness and respect for elders that most thais show each others everywhere, but also the fact that teachers in Thailand enjoy a higher status than both doctors and lawyers and many other professions.

Officially the volunteers are supposed to "assist the thai teachers in their lessons" or something like that. Unofficially the thai teachers either leave after five minutes of the class, or don't show up at all, which means you have the whole class to yourself. Scary? At first of course, but after a while if the thai teacher actually participated it became almost annoying not to have total control over the lesson. Control freak issues maybe...

The students' level of english wasn't nearly as high as I'd expected from a group of 17-21 year olds hoping to one day work in tourism or hotel managment, but it was better than most other thai people. That meant starting with the basics, but not as basic as the alphabet, bodyparts or something else we did in third grade in Sweden. We (I later when I was teaching alone) tried to focus on conversational english in situations they might encounter later in their careers. Hotel and ticket reservations, dealing with food drinks in different ways, stuff like that. It was a lot of fun, especially having them memorize cocktails as homework. What's in a Long Island Iced Tea...? Grammar wasn't much use trying to teach them, mostly because that required a thai teacher who could actually explain it to them, but also because their textbooks were filled with grammatical errors to begin with. One week I was feeling extremely confident in my teaching abilities (ha!) and tried teaching them about irregular verbs...didn't work at all.

They were also very fond of games, no matter what kind of game as long as there was some kind of competitive side to it they would go crazy. Hangman was a big favorite, tic tac another. It was also really fun for us to watch the transformation a group of shy, quiet students can go through once you say the word "gametime!".
The morning routine was another highlight, where the students would line up each morning in front of the school to listen to the teachers and sometimes sing the national anthem. Due to the fact that our driver usually was a little late we'd often miss the lineup and had to go straight to class, therefore this picture is from another volunteers' school. Looks almost like at my school though.

Even though we, or I, didn't get much assitance from the teachers (to their defence, they were pretty busy), they were still extremely helpful in every way and made a big effort trying to make us feel welcome at the school. We would always get the best table in the canteen, students or teachers would bring us food, sometimes with a little surprise to it, and they seemed genuinely happy about having us there. Overall, the school was more modern and felt more like a high school in Sweden than what I had pictured a thai school would be like, even though there are some huge differences when it comes to teaching techniques.