No Fear!

My second day of teaching done!  It went well, I think – though not quite as well as yesterday.  My first lesson was boring.  I knew it, the kids felt it, and I felt bad.  I’m definitely planning on making it up to them tomorrow with a fun game – especially because even though the lesson was boring, they were my best behaved class of the day.  My second class was good – the lesson for that class was a lot better and the kids seemed to really get into it.  We were talking about frogs.  Frogs are fun!   Also, the kids were begging me to show them a cartoon yesterday (it is the highlight of every class for them if they get to watch Tom and Jerry or equivalent), so I found a video with a song and a frog.  Please, enjoy it for yourselves! Note the parts where an animal is getting thrown, squished, whacked, or in some other way “harmed” and imagine a classroom full of 7 year olds laughing hysterically.  They loved it.  And it’s really fun for me to watch and enjoy it with them.

My last class must have had candy in their previous class because they were little chatterboxes.  It was too bad because I had a really fun activity planned with cutting out magazines and stuff, plus a Donald Duck video (!), but we barely got to any of it.  It’s ok because I had planned to spend some time on it tomorrow too and it just means I have very little lesson planning to do for that class tomorrow.  Plus, even though the class wasn’t fun for me, once they got to the activity they seemed to really enjoy it and that’s what actually matters. 

But this has been all about teaching!  What about the other things going on in my life?  Well, currently I’m living in a hotel.  Hopefully tomorrow I’ll go out with my teacher assistant/assistant site coordinator to look at apartments.  Ideally it would be something near the school under 5000 baht per month (30 baht to 1 usd) but really I’d just like to be somewhere.  I’ve decided that hotel living is not for me – a little too restrictive in terms of what I can do with the space.  Also, my hotel room is covered in pictures of Manchester United players.  Don’t get me wrong, they’re attractive, it’s just not what I want to be living in for the next 6 months. 

Food, however, does not seem to be an issue any way you look at it.  Every night is a new adventure in trying the prepared food at either the night market or just across the street.  So far, everything has been yummy – even if I have very little idea what is in it or what it’s called.  For example, the other night it was raining, so me and two of the teachers I’ve been working with just went across the street and had this egg thing.  It looked like a latke but it was made with eggs and it had some other stuff in it too.  That is where it got mysterious.  I think there might have been bugs.  I’m not sure though.  I didn’t really like that part so I kind of picked around them as best I could.  It’s all part of the experience though and so far I’m really loving it.  I could go on and on about the food but I’ll stop and leave it for another post.  As my students say “Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Tomorrow!”