Teaching

Monday was my first day of teaching and work at Lamplaimat Pattana High School. I am assisting in two to three English classes a day, primarily for grades 1-6 but occasionally for Kindergarden as well. I have now taught every student here at least once and it is a pleasure to do so. The students are for thge most part quite attentive and interested in learning, and they soak up information. I am really keen on working on their pronounciation, which due to the fact that their English teachers are Thai, is not standard American pronounciation. I also have played soccer and basketball with the students every day during their and my free time. Since I only teach two or three classes a day, I have plenty of free time to read, an opportunity that I really have enjoyed.

The Lamplaimat Pattana School is on the side of a two lane road and 8 km from the nearest village 500 residents, Lamplaimat. Therefore, I am extremely limited in what I can do in my free time, unlike in Bangkok where the possibilities for exploration are endless. In my free time I can either go online, watch some movies I brought, walk around the school, exercise by myself, or read. So far I have spent almost all of my free time reading. I realize that it sounds strange that I traveled 10,000 miles just to spend time reading in my free time, but it is a leisure that I value greatly and rarely get to do during the year. I'm plowing through books at about 100 pages a day and learning a lot. 

I do, however, spend a lot of time with the teachers here. While they do not speak particularly good English, it has been really fun to have them show me around. They laugh at me for not being interested in eating things like snake, scorpion, spider, shark, and chicken feet, but I think that the criticism is by far the better option. 

One of the things that the headmaster of the school does is train teachers from all over Thailand and Cambodia. Every couple days there is a new group of 15-30 teachers that are here for training. I went to one of these trainings and the person that spoke before the headmaster was the politician responsible for all the students in this province (one of 76 in Thailand). Being a young college student who knows tedious lectures, I have the apt ability to recognize when people are bored out of their minds. This politician bored 200 people for 45 minutes. However, I was particularly impressed at the headmaster's skill in engaging the audience. For one and a half hours, the headmaster kept every teacher at the conference engaged - everyone appeared to be learning a lot. However, I have absolutely no clue what was said during the entirety of that event because it was all in Thai, but I was nonetheless impressed.

On Tuesday, the headmaster took the 30 trainees, me, and four teachers from the school to a barge on a river/canal for dinner. I didn't realize it yet but the barge was to be pulled by a Thai motorboat and we were going to spend about four hours going through 7 km of an incredibly beautiful Thai river. There were two grills on the barge, made out of a oil-sized barrel split in half, and we had a feast on the barge while making our way down the river. There were at least 12 whole grilled fish (which were delicious) and a bunch of grilled meats and ground meat products that had pork in it. There were also two TV's hooked up to a computer that puzzled me as to their presence... until I began to hear an older trainee singing what I assume to be a famous Thai song and missing every - karaoke. After eating, however, I sat at the front of the barge, sipped on a beer the Thai way (with ice in it), and watched the sun set as we meandered downstream.

When traveling in new places, I try my best to go with the flow and make the most of the opportunity at hand. Occasionally, however, I stop for a minute and think about experience that I am having. As I sat at the front of the barge and watched the sun set, I had one of those moments. I thought about how incredible it was that I was standing on a boat on a river in rural Thailand, 10,000 miles away from home. These type of experiences really make one appreciate how large and diverse the world is - not only geographically but culturally. Anyways, some of my favorite pictures that I have ever taken occurred on this outing, so please make sure to check out the Lamplaimat album (the list of links is on the right hand side of the blog).

I am still killing bugs left and right in my room. It is still incredibly hot here. And, the food is great. I cooked my first Thai meal consisting of a Thai omlette, som tam (spicy papaya salad), and some fresh fruits and vegetables. There are literally  dozens if not hundreds of fruits that I have never tried before, and I am slowly but surely making my way through them. I have eaten Durian, Mangosteen, green mango, green papaya, jackfruit, a lychee-like fruit with "hair" (see pictures), and a couple fruits that I have no clue what they are called. There are also over twenty types of mango here so I am trying to learn the varieties of my favorite fruit.

In a couple days I am returning to Bangkok and flying to D.C. for two days of Pickering Fellowship orientation, and then flying back to Bangkok. I am flying through Seoul, South Korea, so I am hoping that the latest tensions between the Koreas do not escalate.