Teachers, I Salute You

Teachers, I salute you.
I salute you, I admire you, and I apologize for any mistreatment.

All of that is coming back to haunt me in this karma-centric country.

Seriously. Garnering the attention of a mob, maintaining it, and doing something meaningful with it... that takes a lot of skill. I am only two days into my term as an English teacher, but I already am starting to realize how much energy, time and creativity this position demands.

Let's go to Thailand! I thought. Let's spend a lot of time there! I planned. Let's fully immerse in the language and culture! I dreamed. Let's do something meaningful! I hoped.

Let's teach! I jumped ahead of myself.

An extreme troublemaker who hates me
during class, but comes to play in my
office during his breaks

Granted, I'm only teaching for one semester. I only have 3-5 classes per day, and I've been blessed with incredible resources- through my school itself, through the agency that has employed me, and through my training program. I have breaks during the day, and get to retreat to a nice, air-conditioned office to gather myself and prep for the next classes. Most teachers commit their whole lives to this, whereas I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

But I am teaching 5-12 year olds, most of which have no idea what I'm saying. Thai and English are such incredibly different languages that it seems impossible for someone to understand the other. I've studied Spanish and Portuguese, and was able to deduce words through cognates or similar words in English. No such luck here.

For one, we have a completely different writing structure, for another, we have completely different pronunciations and tones.

Example: Does anyone speak English?
In Thai:มีใครพูดภาษาอังกฤษได้บ้าง?
In English phonetics: (mee krai pôot paa-săa ang-grìt dâi bâang?)

A simple word introduction turns into several minutes of saying, repeating, going around the class and having them repeat in groups, as individuals, and all together. Even then, many will still say it with a heavy enough accent that it sounds like something else. 

Our school has no system for discipline. After I struggled to get the attention of first graders, I asked to sit in on a Thai teacher teaching them in Thai after me, thinking perhaps it was my garbled English threats and pleading and games and punishments that were being ignored, because they didn't understand me. But the Thai teachers consistently lost control, and resorted to hitting kids with rulers to get them to sit down- even as they taught they chose to just ignore the kids talking and playing around them. In the younger classes, the teachers use microphones to talk over the kids. 

My older classes are amazing, and clearly my happiness
to have students who understood me translated. I was
much nicer, so some of the students liked me (as opposed to
the youngins that I wanted to terrorize).

I asked about sending kids to the principle, or giving them bad grades, or even just taking their names down when they misbehaved. I hoped that because this was my second day, this is just my incapability as a teacher, my inexperience with a classroom. But from asking the Thai teachers, and the other foreign English teachers, that's just the way things are. You can't really punish them, because the school doesn't have a way to. You can't really grade them poorly, because their parents are paying so much tuition that the school doesn't want you to. 

SO I clearly have my work cut out for me. I didn't think too much of it, trying my hand at teaching- I've tutored before, volunteered as an English teacher in Brazil- but this is so incredibly different. 


Teaching takes so much effort. Planning every minute of the day, how you will engage the students, then having back up plan after back up plan. Learning several hundred names (nicknames for me, but even still, some of their nicknames are Kluengnaw or Paoda- and there are about twenty Aoms). Creating games and stories, flashcards and props- literally creating, buying or crafting everything you want to use in your lessons. 

Joey, a helpful nickname if it were legible.
And my name is Teacher C, because Clare is
way too hard to pronounce (cwawe is most common). 

In high school and college, I think I really started to value my teachers, appreciated the work that they did, and acknowledged that some did such an incredible job. But for the teachers that I disliked, or the ones that I thought did a poor job, I never really considered why. Why they couldn't be better, why they didn't do things differently. 

Because it's hard. 

I do think that this is the worst of it, that things will get better as I learn more about my students and can adapt to them, can develop lessons towards their interests and engage them better. As I become more experienced, as I change and develop myself, maybe I can serve them better and this will become easier.

Last summer, interning at Target, I was told that one of my "opportunities", the areas I could work on, was to "engage and inspire others". 

Here's to hoping I figure that one out, quickly.