Life as a Kindergarten Teacher

Hey everyone! Sorry for the delay in posting. If you can believe it, not much has happened so that’s why I haven’t been updating my blog regularly. I know it seems weird- the last post was so full of exciting things. So I’ll start there.

The following week… nothing. The entire city went back to normal, and it was like the civil war never happened. It was really weird actually. I started teaching on Monday and nobody talked about what had happened, and besides posters popping up around the city about the importance of unity, and events held for displaced vendors so they could still sell things, people just didn’t really talk about it at all.

There are also several burned down buildings in Bangkok now. I think I updated right before this happened, but the last few days of the civil war the government started cracking down and there actually weren’t that many red shirts left in Bangkok, and so those who were left started burning down buildings and doing what they could to keep everything going. The biggest building they burned down was CentralWorld. It’s the second biggest, if not the biggest, mall in Thailand and also Thailand’s trade center, which I actually didn’t know till it burned down. It was mostly sad for me because Forever 21 is one of my favorite stores, but I would have thought that Thai people would have been really upset about it, and maybe they were, but society just carried on as usual. The BTS started running again, the streets were crowded with traffic, all schools started up, and it was as if nothing had happened at all.

And that’s really all I have to report on the political situation. It doesn’t seem as if the government has taken any major steps toward solving the issues with the red shirts, besides kicking them out of Bangkok, and I think everyone here is really hoping that things don’t happen again. The government is saying they’re going to follow some kind of “road map” plan to address some of the red shirts’ demands but it doesn’t seem as if any big changes have happened politically just yet. There are a few articles cropping up on Thaksin’s involvement (previous prime minister) and attempts to bring him back to Thailand to be put on trial, etc., but otherwise nothing major about the riots has been in the news.

I’m officially getting in to the swing of things with teaching, which has been both fun and stressful. I’m teaching four classes in K2 mathematics at Panaya. That basically means I teach the same thing four times a day to four different groups of four year olds. I really enjoy the kids at Panaya. They’re so sweet and most of them genuinely like learning English and just want to be like best friends with me. Of course I have a few kids who are really bad. One of my classes has 27 kids, and it’s definitely the most difficult class to control behavior-wise. They’re a trial every day. They’re really smart, they have some of the smartest kids in the whole grade level, but because there are so many of them it’s harder to keep tabs on all of them.

Which brings me to the stressful part of my job. One of the things I find stressful is that I have a class of 27 kids and a class of 17 kids. How does that happen, you might ask. Why would it make sense to put 27 kids in the K2/1 class and only 17 kids in the K2/4 class? Apparently the parents assume because the class is called K2/1, it’s the smartest class since it’s number 1, so they all want their kids to be in K2/1. I wish I was kidding.

And since it’s a private school, the way behavior and discipline works is based around whose parents will freak out if their child is reprimanded. I have one student who is a really intelligent kid, actually one of my favorite kids though I’m not supposed to have favorites, and he’s constantly getting into trouble. Usually it’s because he knows the stuff already, he has a native English father so he’s already fluent in English. I reprimand all my kids in the same way- I’ll say their name really sternly if they aren’t paying attention, I won’t give them stickers or stamps that day, I’ll take their work book away if they aren’t following along at the right place, etc. I generally handle discipline through good reinforcements like writing the good kids names on the board so they get stickers and telling the kids that if they’re good, we’ll get to play a game.

The Thai teachers who are in the classroom with me are technically supposed to be in charge of handling discipline, and for the most part they do. They’ll slap kids hands if they’re being bad, etc. But some of the kids they don’t treat like the other kids because of their parents. I’m not saying I think kids’ hands should be slapped at all, but it’s a little frustrating that we have to keep certain kids happy at all times so that their parents won’t pull them out of the school. It’s really more like a business than a school, and it’s been a little hard for me to deal with the politics because I just want to treat all of the kids the same way.

The other thing that’s been really frustrating is the way the system at my school works. I’m a new teacher at my school, and at this point I’m the only first year teacher in Thailand- the other first year teachers have all been fired. So let’s just say there’s a little pressure on me because of this fact alone. I knew going in that I was going to make mistakes. My training was observing two teachers and then being thrown into lessons, where I was given no feedback, so of course I’m going to make mistakes. The problem is that the Thai teachers don’t talk to me about the mistakes I make. They talk to the principal and then the principal talks to me. Which is so much worse than if they could just come to me and tell me to adjust my lessons a little bit in certain ways.

Case and point. Last week I taught pictographs. To four year olds. Who don’t speak English. Yeah that was a real party, let me tell you. They understood the basic concepts of pictographs, but then one day we had a worksheet where they had to count how many pictures of chairs there were vs. how many pictures of tables there were, and tell me how many more chairs there were than tables. At this age, we are just kind of starting addition in English. It’s a difficult concept for kids to learn in a language that isn’t their own. So for me to teach them the concept of counting “how many more” was not a one day thing. I knew going in that my kids probably wouldn’t get it, and they didn’t completely. So I planned to spend the next day going over it again.

Well one of the Thai teachers went to the principal with the workbook page and told her that the kids didn’t understand my lesson. All of a sudden I’m getting called into the principal’s office and being told that she wants me to observe another teacher teaching a lesson on pictographs because she doesn’t think I know how to teach it properly. The frustrating thing of it was, the other teacher, who is a friend of mine at the school, ended up teaching the lesson while I observed, taught everything I had already taught without teaching the concept of “how many more” at all, and did a workbook page in a completely different unit, throwing off my whole schedule. And this made the principal happy and the Thai teachers happy, so I had to deal with it. It was also a bit frustrating for me because I don’t want to think that the Thai teachers are going to run to the principal every time my kids don’t understand a lesson the first day I teach it. I mean, some of these concepts are difficult. We’re using books that are meant for kids in regular English kindergarten, not ESL, and they’re books made in Singapore no less. My kids aren’t always going to understand everything the first time, and I don’t like feeling as if I have to go in to each lesson as if I only have fifty minutes for them to perfectly get each concept.

There has definitely been a lot I’ve had to figure out about Thai culture in the past few months and really quickly. Speaking of Thai culture, we had the best holiday celebration ever a few weeks ago- Teacher Appreciation Day. Let’s just spend a minute talking about how much I love Teacher Appreciation Day. This should be a worldwide thing. Our students brought us presents and flowers, and there was a whole ceremony where they gave us bouquets, and it was a wonderful day all around. We were all pretty excited about it.

Besides teaching, the only other major event in my life is that I’m moving this week. My roommate Kristina is leaving on Wednesday to go back to the US, so Holly and I are both moving out of our apartment and closer to our schools. I’m moving into a building called The Winning Tower in Phra Khanong, which is in the same section of town as my school. I’ll be sure to update my address, don’t worry. I signed a lease starting on Thursday and I have to be out of my other apartment by Friday night, so I literally have two nights to move everything from one apartment to the other. In theory I only have two suitcases worth of things, but that’s really only in theory. I’m hoping it’ll only take two trips, but we’ll see.

I’m pretty excited about my new apartment. It’s a studio and it has a bed, desk, little couch, dining table with four chairs, a little kitchen area with a fridge, and a bathroom. It’s pretty basic and the whole building is ancient, but I kind of like the lived-in feel the whole place has. I’m going to buy some new sheets and a comforter, and a few other things. I may also get a microwave. I’m still trying to figure out why the kitchen counter has a fan above it, but no stovetop. I’m also trying to figure out how I’m supposed to have three friends over to eat at my dining room table when I can’t cook dinner haha. It’s a little bit interesting, but that’s Thailand for you. There is a ton of space and I have air conditioning and plenty of storage space, so I can’t complain too much. Plus there is a gym and a pool in the building, which is nice, and the apartment is right on a major street in a safe area of town. The best part is that I no longer have to get up at 5:30 am! I can sleep in a whole hour. It’s going to be awesome.

I’ll be sure to take pictures once I get everything set up! I know I haven’t updated any pictures in awhile, but to be perfectly honest I actually haven’t taken that many lately. I may take a trip outside of Bangkok in a few weeks, so there may also be some more exciting pictures than those of my new, slightly old, slightly lived in apartment haha.

I miss all of you! I’ll try to update more often, though the updates will likely be slightly shorter than they have been before since most of my life is consumed by teaching. I hope everything is going well back in the States!!

Love,

Monica