Work

Our first day of work at the C-------- Palace School was last Wednesday.  We get picked up in a van every morning and are driven to school.  The palace is surrounded by a moat full of what we thought were alligators, but what are actually giant monitor lizards, the largest lizards in the world.  They let you walk right up to them!  There are guards at the gate with big machine guns.  Scary!  The palace is closed to the public, only a privileged few get to see inside.  

We first had a lunch of traditional Thai food and some delicious tropical fruit, including fresh lychee, my favorite.  Then we had an orientation and set up bank accounts with the bank within the palace grounds so that we could get paid, chaching!  

The next two days were spent planning lessons for the next week, as school begins Monday.  I will be teaching prathom 5, which can be equated to our fifth grade.  The school is broken up into three sections:  Kindergarten 1-3(three years as opposed to one, ages 4-6), Pratthom 1-6, and Matthayom 1-6.  School is broken up into periods of one hour each, much like our high school system.  Mondays I teach speech for Pratthom 5, three periods with 20 students each.  Tuesday and Wednesday I teach reading three periods, and Thursday and Friday I get to teach speech to Pratthom 2, my favorite grade! 

Our dress code is very strict, we must wear collared, button-down shirts, and long skirts every day.  There are colors for each day: Monday:yellow, Tuesday:pink, Wednesday:green, Thursday:orange, Friday:blue.  The colors are related to the days that the royal family was born.  The King was born on a Monday, and his color is yellow...

The King is very loved and revered by the people, and you cannot walk five feet without seeing a picture of him.  It seems that he is a very compassionate and caring leader.

The people we work with are soooo nice, they are so interested in us and so welcoming and willing to help.  They keep feeding us!!!  It has been slightly confusing and frustrating because things seem disorganized and unplanned, everything changes last minute, and we recieve very little specific information.  But we have been told that this is partly a cultural difference that we just have to get used to, as Thai communication is high context, and based less on explicit information than US culture.  

We have our own desks in the little English department office.  I sit next to Amy.  School starts tomorrow.  Wheeee!