Fish Out of Water

I know many of you were anxiously awaiting this post… Refreshing the page over and over again until you heard how our day of teaching went… well, at least I hope one person checked at least once! If you didn’t know, a usual first day of student teaching is observing the host teacher teach the class so that you become familiar with the curriculum, procedures, and the students before jumping in. Well, that was not the case for us today. Never has the phrase, “a fish out of water” fit my life better. But for the first half of the day, we sat in our “office” that we share with two science teachers…not sure why we are there, but we have our own desk, so that’s fun. Ari and I taught two classes today of English. Not the English we were trained for (communication arts and literature), but ESL classrooms. The students were eighth graders, so about 14 years old. Some of them can decently speak, but for the most part, they can say good morning very well… That’s it. Not knowing where to start, we thought we could focus on the weather. Have you ever thought about explaining the word weather? Without being able to speak the language the rest of the class speaks? Let me tell you, it’s difficult. I really want to send a “thank you” card to every single one of my Spanish teachers that tried to attempt to teach a girl that couldn’t care less about the language. It’s a tough thing to do, especially for middle school students.

After attempting to explain what the word weather means, we had them practice communicating using that word. They got in partners and asked each other, “how is the weather?” and their partner would answer, “the weather is _______”. We taught them the words: hot (Thailand), cold (Minnesota), sunny, rainy, and cloudy. We drew pictures to help them understand as well. The classrooms have little technology, so we used a white board for our lessons. I haven’t been in a classroom without a smartboard while teaching ever, so this was an experience as well.

Once the students had discovered that “the weather is sunny”, we moved on to the phrase, “how are you?” with responses like, “I am ___________ (good, bad, sad, mad). Hopefully, these things made sense to at least half. We used actions for several of these. Good always had thumbs up, and I’m pretty sure I stomped on the floor for mad, so there’s that…

For lunch, a nice teacher took us to lunch across the street. Apparently there is no such thing as cafeteria duty or anything like that! Kids just simply wander where they want to- MUCH different than schools back home. However, when we were done for the day, 4 students took pictures with us. It was almost like being a celebrity… Ari and I felt legit, despite the sweat glistening on our foreheads. If only we had a makeup artist to help us out like all the actresses do!

For dinner, Dr. Denny, who is our university supervisor, took us, our host families, his own family, and several other professors from UDRU (Udon Thani’s university) out to BARB-B-Q. This is, in fact, the Thai version of barbequing. It was quite the experience. Words and pictures do not do it justice. You order raw meat, sea food, and veggies and then you fry it on your plate. When it’s done, you can dip it in multiple sauces. Afterwards, we had ice cream. And why wouldn’t the chocolate chip ice cream have coconut jello squares in it? Just a day in the life of Thailand.

So apparently, I’m a teacher. I also am quite successful at using chopsticks. I am also famous.

Or simply an American girl in Udon Thani, Thailand.

Xoxo Kenzkeg