I'm now even further down the track away from Mid-terms and I've taught my last ever lesson at PR School, I'm in the process of testing the children for their unofficial end of year exams.
(Unofficial in that I'm under no contractual obligation to do it, but the children deserve to know where they are. Although in truth, a lot of my grades are highly inflated, purely to give the kids the confidence and enthusiasm to advance their studies. I'll cover this in another post about 'English in North East Thailand'.)
It's very appropriate today to write an article on M5 as what happened today is typical of my experience teaching them.
Due to a last minute realisation that Scout camp, end of year exams and a school trip where going severely reduce the amount of time I had to test the students, I was left with the only option of having to get test 30 children, on conversational English, in 1 hour! (there will probably be a post later on entitled "No one tells Teacher Steve nuffin'"). Due to the timetable this was 0830 on a Thursday morning. I feared the worst.
M5's progress in English is victim to the school timetable (comedians will claim that its because they are taught by me 3 hours a week). Of the 3 hours I teach them, 2 of those lessons start at 0830...... just after assembly.
Sometimes, Thai school assembly is all over in 10 minutes (National Anthem, Buddhist prayer, Student's promise, School song, everyone 'Wais' each other. Job done). Unfortunately I teach M5 on Wednesday and Thursday.
On Wednesday's its English Assembly, meaning that sometimes I get pulled up to teach the children some key phrases. On other weeks Kru KhaoJao gets up on stage and teaches the children a few inappropriate phrases I taught her whilst watching the football on Sunday evening.
Assembly overruns by 10 minutes, the children disappear for breakfast and then by the time they are all in class I've got 20 minutes with them.
Thursday's are even worse. The assemblies can last for days. I have no idea why.
Today I turned up at school ready to test 30 students in 60 minutes, only to find out that the lesson had been replaced with a 'PR's Got Talent' show in the school hall, I kid you not. Buddha wept.
Bless, my lovely M5 students, but they were very happy to re-schedule the test out of hours.
M5 are probably my most conscientious class. No problem students. Lots of strong English speakers without any being exceptional. This probably boils down to the fact that out of 30 students, 27 of them are girls.
They were a great class that lacked a few characters... until I was tipped off that Som-O had a huge crush on one of my M4 students and then the lessons became a lot more interesting. Its amazing how talkative the kids become in English when they want to drop one of their friends in it
Luckily, Som-O is a lovely girl with a great sense of humour and every time she found another way to deny it, she improved her speaking skills.
Otherwise Jam was the best student. Perfect pronunciation and very sweet girl. She's regularly stop me at school to tell me about her new puppies and this made me realise how good her English is. Unfortunately one of her puppies has become sick recently and upon hearing that news Teacher now fears the worse and is trying to avoid an awkward conversation with young Jam ("How is your puppy Jam?" "It died that morning"). **Touch Wood** that does not happen.
Which leads me to the 3 boys. They are past adolescence and in a class of 27 girls, yet they all sit their as timid as door mice. No obvious lady boys in the class.
....Man up guys... some of the girls in your class are gorgeous (in a non-pervy.... they will look good in 5 years time kind of way).
Future related posts might include "Oh my God, Why in Thai Music videos is the singer ALWAYS longing for a girl he's never had the courage to speak to?" and "The difference between Western and Thai concepts of attractiveness)".
The conclusion is that Thai boys are shy.... or that the boys with the hormones racing had the sense to request being dropped down a class for fear of not being able to concentrate in 5/1.
An awkward conclusion to this post is that sometimes I get the 'Indianna Jones 'love you' eyes' from a couple of the girls in the class and I'm embarrassed to say sometimes it is distracting. Those poor girls need to get out of North East Thailand and meet a few more farang. I'm really not 'it'.
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