Teaching Practices

It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve even really thought about my blog. It’s terribly cliché to say that I’ve been a little busy, but I’ve been a little busy.

Starting Monday of last week, we were responsible for creating daily lesson plans for different teaching methods that we’ve been learning and then the next day we have to execute them in front of a class of students.

There are four main methods in the technique that we’ve been learning, called the Communicative Model, and they all focus on teaching communication relevant to the students by setting up the context of the setting with modeling and illustrations, repetition to remember the phrases and then a functional aspect where they would use the language learned in a practical way. When we were taught Korean with this model, the words and symbols made sense without our teacher speaking a word of English, and it really reinforced how effective the method can be.

For the first week, we were in a school and teaching mostly older Prathom students, which is the Primary level age. Since Thailand doesn’t require students to attend school after the age of 14, it’s relatively rare to find a class in a small town or rural village with many students older than this, and any high school level classes (Mathayom) are relatively small, and apparently attendance rates drop as much as 50% after this age.

Looking back, that week was surprisingly painless. The first day was kind of a shock to everyone’s system and I’m pretty sure that we all forgot some part of the method or another and generally felt like we weren’t that effective. However, we learned from our classes and were able to create lessons and materials for the next 3 days with relative ease. Every day was a different class, so the method and the material were all relatively new and the classes were old enough that for the most part they wanted to learn, which made our job even easier. The hardest part for me was really drawing the picture cards, for the most part as long as I can create an accurate cheat sheet that I tape to the board and actually follow, remembering the method isn’t the hard part. Coming up with pictures that stayed in the context of the lesson (what are you afraid of and why) and not having them look like a 3-year-old drew them took way too much time.

After another Saturday night on the Island where I spent way too much money, but had an amazing time dancing with this group of really fun Thai girls who I wish I could have understood more, we got right into our second week of teacher practices.

Teaching lesson #1 Leave your stress at the door:

Seriously.

This week was a little more difficult, and there were times when I would leave the school and want to dig myself a hole in the ground to disappear into. Hearing feedback from the others in the course that I wasn’t the only one who felt their lessons didn’t fully go as planned was a little bit of a relief, but I’ve placed so much on this that failure is not an option. Not only that, but since we could all see the light at the end of the tunnel, the stress of finding a job was really starting to get to me.

I’m sure my friends were worried with all the stressed out and emotional e-mails I sent, followed by “nevermind!” and “Man, I’m a little crazy, right?” But I was a total basket-case and didn’t feel as though I really had anyone to talk to that would ease my mind. (I later learned that sometimes, if you open up and let them, people will surprise you by how supportive they can be.)

Classes were harder because the children were younger, some of them really didn’t want to learn, and some of them were frustrated by how easy some of the dialogues were. Mostly though, it was me not being fully present that may have made my lessons suffer, and I realize now that all of this was for naught, and I should have just let everything go and allowed myself to become completely absorbed in planning and teaching my lesson.

The children were really excited that we were there, and everyday after class they would all run around with notebooks or scraps of paper and have us right our names down, sign our autographs or just joke around with them. My favourite part of going out to that school, though, was watching the kids during morning assembly. We weren’t able to watch the assembly at the first school, but here the children would have morning exercise, dancing and doing exercises to music or busting some serious moves hula hoping.

On the final day, after learning 4 different method types, we were left to our own devices and told to create our own lesson plan, have fun with it, but follow some basic guidelines. This turned out to be the biggest lesson of all, because it’s what every teacher does on their first day in their own classroom, and then has to move up from there. I think that two out of four of us left feeling that they had done a good job and that the students had actually learned something. After discussing with our teacher-observer, pretty much all of us learned that we had made some pretty fatal mistakes.

I, for one, knew half way through the class that what was going on could be defined as a trainwreck. But I continued on, changing my lesson plan slightly so that the students could grasp the meanings and confidence to say the phrases, hoping that something was sticking in their impressionable little minds and that I wasn’t totally wasting their time.

At the end, we joined the two classes and our teacher played a giant group game of Simon Says and then handed the winning student a “Thank You” card that we had written out for all the students. One of the students, my favourite little cutie, (I know, I know, you’re not supposed to pick favourites, but it’s hard!!!) handed out these little coloured origami cats to all of the teachers. It seriously melted my heart and made me want to hug him and steal him and keep him forever.

After tests, course evaluations and handing in our reflective portfolios, complete with our lesson plans, any work or teaching for the course was over. We’ve all received our certificates, and the boys have gotten on buses for their next respective destinations: home to Alaska and traveling around Thailand. I’m super sad to see them go, but I’m going to hang out here in Ban Phe for a little while, but that will be explained in my next entry, once I’ve fully figured out what I’m going to be doing.

Student Profiles – Day 1 & 2 in the classroom

Teaching in general is not going to be an easy task, that is something that I was never counting on.

But what I was counting on was how rewarding it would feel when a student learns something and can display it in class with you. The last couple days I’ve spent in a classroom doing one-on-one teaching with a student. As soon as we get off what we’ve started calling the “farang mobile” because it’s carrying us (literally – “foreigners”) and says in big letters across the front “TEFL SCHOOL,” the students chose one of us and led us into the classroom where we sat down and started our lesson for the day.

Day one was kind of a shock. Not only did neither our trainer or trainers assistant join us on our trek to the school, but as soon as we got there, we started. We sat down, introduced ourselves and got right into the lesson. My student, Wannisa, or short-name Tal, was really shy and hardly spoke to me on the first day and it was like pulling teeth trying to make her comfortable enough to share her interests and daily activities with me. By the end of the lesson we were able to laugh with each other and I got most of what I had planned done, so it wasn’t a total bust.

The second day, we had to go through a number of assignments and have our student comfortable enough speaking that we could record a spoken sample from them. By the end of the lesson, she was talking comfortably and I felt really good about everything that we had packed into an hour. The students then gave us these super cute bookmarks with pictures that the teacher took the day before. I was really touched, but Renee was so happy about it she burst into tears of joy. It was a really sweet moment, and I’m going to cherish the memento.

This past week has been a lot of grammar work, like I expected, with some phonology and tips on getting a job and what a resume should look like. Next week and the week after we’re going to be going to a school every day to do one-hour lessons for our teacher practices and I’m going to have to practice my drawing skills so that I can get my point across. Not only do we have to draw on the blackboard (or whiteboard) but I have to make 9 picture cards that will be handed out to the kids to illustrate some vocabulary that they’re going to be learning.

As you can tell, I’m more stressed about the drawings than the actual teaching. What does that say about me? I’m not sure, but once I have my drawings down pat and my lesson planned out, it should (hopefully) go relatively smoothly.

Vietnam seems like a distant memory

So I’ve tried to post this blog 3 times by now, and WordPress keeps saving it empty. I’ve revised this entry so many times (considering that I’ve already been here 2 weeks and haven’t updated!) So I’m going to do a chronological entry of the first week and hope to catch up in the near future. Considering how much homework and research I have to do today, I’m going to keep it brief.

The first day:

I’ve arrived in Ban Phe, settled into a hotel with a huge bed, private bathroom and beautiful restaurant. The only downside is that it doesn’t have wifi in the room, and I’ll have to pay for electricity, but I doubt that I’ll be spending that much time in my room at night aside from sleeping and it’ll keep me from being anti-social on the computer. It will also hopefully keep me on my toes to get schoolwork done. It’s time to focus on everything I need to learn.

After walking around town and tasting some random thing that may or may not have been candied fish skin I bought all the necessities that I’ve run out of (shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste.. blahdy blah) I showered, sat down with my book and a beer and just enjoyed the warm Thailand breeze before calling it an early night.

Starting school:

Everyone I’ve met that has recently graduated from the course, has told me to make sure I exercise my hand and wrist, because there is going to be a LOT of writing to do in the near future. I’ve already come across this with the daily portfolio entries, which are a lot like reflective journal entries on activities of the day.

So far, we’ve had a basic lesson in Korean, just to introduce us to the teaching method, and we’ve self-taught ourselves to speak key phrases in Thai. I say self-taught because what we were really doing was going out into Ban Phe and asking random locals how to say certain words or phrases. It reminded me of doing streeters at Humber, because most of the people in local businesses knew what we were doing and had seen it before.

Once we had an 8-line conversation, we had to teach each other our conversations using the same teaching method that we are learning. (Sometimes I think the hardest part of this course will be memorizing the method that we will be using for our practical teaching experience.) That was super stressful because not only did I not memorize my lines, I had to translate one with numbers in the hundreds. Just to say 250 baht, it was like 7 tiny words.

Learning Thai words has been a lot of fun, and the people in my course all get along really well. We’re a small group this time around, with only 4 people, but there’s American Renee, my neighbour and the woman I met during the airport transfer; Australian Sam, who showed up Sunday night using the computer in the restaurant where I’m staying and randomly asked if I was taking the TEFL course; and American Lance who I’m still trying to figure out, but is an Alaskan commercial fisherman.

We’ve been helping each other learn Thai words, and grasp the concept of the varying teaching methods, all the while, as Sam would say, “taking the piss” out of each other.

The rest of the week we actually practiced applying the teaching method to our own concepts and 4-line conversations, and while it’s frustrating trying to remember the order things go in, the actual teaching part of it is something that I can seriously handle. I forgot how much of a quick learner I am and went through one of the practices with only a minor error. I’m quite proud of myself, but we’ll see how things go when we put everything together and aren’t doing just 5 minute clips of an hour-long lesson.

It looks like next week we’ll be doing some more grammar and hopefully resume prep before we head out to a couple schools to create profiles of students, which I imagine would be just talking to them and learning basic things about them. Then the last two weeks it’s going to be practical teaching everyday. That’s 8 in-class lessons in the morning and the afternoon / evening to prepare for the next one.

I can see why the people who graduated most recently spent the entire weekend drinking…

Weekend on Koh Samet:

Just this past weekend, we got to enjoy our time off on the beaches of Koh Samet. We arrived late, as the last ferry was loaded as high as it would go with boxes of beer and water and food, found some bungalows and headed out to dinner and a poi show. Unfortunately I wasn’t very camera savvy in capturing pictures of these guys doing the fire show, but watching about 20 guys doing some serious acrobatics and baton twirling with giant sticks on fire left me with a stupid grin on my face for the better part of an hour. Those guys were amazing!

The weekend basically consisted of fire shows, food, drinks, dancing and lots of beach time. While I didn’t exactly lay myself out in the sun, I was able to enjoy the beach from a lounge chair in the shade where I could happily people watch. (Well, those people that weren’t wearing speedo’s.) We also went on a sunset snorkel, where Sam who’s biggest passion is scuba diving, handed me a sea cucumber after he’d managed to irritate it and it pooped all over my hands. (Of course, it didn’t exactly look like poop as it was white, super sticky and stringy and he told me it was something else…) Then we watched the sunset from a beach and it was seriously the strangest, most beautiful I’ve seen in a while. While the picture does it no justice, the sun itself looks like it’s disappearing into the clouds and never meets the horizon.

I plan to go back before I leave, considering just how close I am, and how little it costs to get there (100 baht for the ferry = approx $3), I could even make a day trip out of it if I didn’t want to dish out the money for a bungalow.

We’ll have to see just how much work we end up getting by the end of this week!