Every morning at 7am, twelve American English teachers pile into a van that takes us to school. We usually arrive at 7:30 and eat breakfast in the office. There is a deli on campus which sells the kind of food you would find at a 7eleven, and a bakery with all sorts of baked goods. I usually have raisin toast or cereal with soy milk.
At 8am, we run a program called Reading Rainbow, which is designed to encourage the kids to read in English. This is our favorite part of the day because we get to work one on one with the kids. They choose a book and read it to us and then we ask them questions about the book. If they answer correctly, they get a stamp on their Reading Rainbow card, which can be redeemed for prizes. I have suggested we get a lifesize cutout of LaVar Burton but no one seems to find this amusing.
Classes begin at 9:20 am.
The English curriculum at C--------- School is mainly worksheets. While we were told that we would be able to develop our own lesson plans, the worksheets are mandatory.
There are three Prathom 5 (fifth grade) classrooms, each with about forty students. Instead of the students moving around, the teachers come to them, unless they have a science lab or P.E. class or something.
The P5 classrooms are on the fourth(top) floor. All of the walkways are outdoors, and there are no elevators.
The classes are split into two groups on Wednesday and Thursday, so I have to take my group elsewhere, to the top floor of another building. Which means that three times per day I have to walk up to the top floor, gather my students. Usually, when I go to get the students, they are very late because their homeroom teachers do not follow the schedule(no one really does). I then attempt to get them to walk with some semblance of propriety (or at least without screaming and shoving) across campus to another building, and up the stairs to the top floor. The students remove their shoes outside the classroom, a raucous and chaotic affair, and then I spend about ten minutes getting the students settled in and less noisy(quiet just isn't an option).
Since there are only fifty minutes in a class period, this leaves me with about 20 minutes left to "teach" which really just entails me frantically passing out worksheets and prodding the students to stop screaming and fake sword fighting and finish their work.
When the last student is finally finished, I run back over to the first room and start this process all over again.
When I finally make it to lunch I flop down into my seat with the six other disheveled and haggard looking english teachers, and we just all look at each other with expressions of horror and bewilderment.
After lunch, we start to grade the massive, never ending stacks of worksheets, which are never recorded into a grade book, and which the students therefore do not put any effort into.
By the time I look up from grading its four o'clock and time to go.
We walk single file through the endless line of cars out to the entrance of the palace. There are these beautiful red Brahman cows that live on the grounds, and we pass them on our way out. I always say hi and they come over to get pet. There are two calves and a mama cow. They are soooo cuute! At the gate, we walk past the guards with giant guns and one friendly guard hails us a cab, or we walk home, which takes about a half hour.
The rest of the school curriculum seems really amazing. The kids learn the basics, Thai, math, reading, science, history, and they also learn cooking, art, flower arranging, meditation, martial arts, ping pong, swimming, computers, television production, dance, sign language, Chinese, and of course English.
For some reason though, they really like these English worksheets and refuse to stray. It is quite frustrating, and I feel so guilty that my students never do anything but worksheets. Ugh.
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