Processing...

There is a middle-aged Scottish man that works at the school in our program, but he has been sick and has only been at the school a handful of times since we've been there. I finally got to observe him teach a bit. It was math class and the kids were working. The kids would come up and ask me questions. I have absolutely no idea what I learned in 1st grade, but I thought some of this stuff was a bit complex for 1st graders. I don't much care for the books that they have in math. They give an example and then give a few problems for the kids to do. I felt like the kids were basically just copying from the 1st problem, seeing what numbers go where, but not really understanding the math behind it. For a moment I felt, is this hindering the students learning English this soon because they don't even know their own language well enough yet? Are they not learning these basic concepts as well because they aren't in Thai? Are they trying to teach them too much at once or too hard of concepts because of this special MEP class?
An interesting thing I learned was that all the names of our students that I've desperately been trying to learn, are not their real names, they are their English names. They do that because their real names would be too hard to pronounce. I think it would be strange having 2 names in life.  The parents pick their English names.  Here are a few examples of some names of my students; Earth, Gun, June, Yolk, Copter, Big, Tong, Mine, Bonus, Pat, On, March, Korn, it goes on and on! And these names look easy enough to pronounce, but alot of them you need to say with your Thai accent, NOT your American accent or they won't understand!
We got Juan, from Greenway to pick us up so we could join our fellow housemates for the weekly Wednesday dinner. He asked if we wanted to be picked up every Wednesday and we said yes....just to have a bit of a release and to be able to speak English with other people! On our way home we passed a Disco club....I couldn't believe it! Juan asked me if I wanted to go.  I felt trapped so I said sure...and immediately he said, "when?" I said I wasn't sure. I heard that it's actually kind of a shady place and that fights breakout sometimes.
I'm sorry I don't have alot of pictures this blog. I haven't been taking as many since we haven't been traveling as much! But here is one of an interesting lunch they served us at school last week!

This past Thursday at school, we basically had an all day assembly and activities. In the morning all the 1st graders gathered in a big hall and some teachers spoke to them (I wish I knew what was being said!). For the next few hours, we met with 8 different groups of 1st graders and taught them, "Hello, my name is ...., what's your name....my name is....nice to meet you."  We had a few of our kids speckled in with all the groups and you could definitely see that they were much more advanced in their English. At the end of this activity, us teachers did the one-on-one conversation with all the kids. It was during that time that I was very close to these kids, and realized how absolutely terrible their teeth were! Most of these kids haven't even lost their baby teeth yet, so it was their baby teeth that were black and half their.  I wonder if hygiene isn't properly taught here.

On Friday night we had a couple people from Greenway stop by. It was akward at 1st because the first 2 to show up didn't speak alot of English. When the head guys wife came, she spoke English well, and we tried to talk to her about our TEFL issues. She tried explaining things and talked about a plan of how we would get it...but it didn't sound like anything we had signed up for. It sounded like we would just do observing and James would continue to teach us things, but there was nothing about the actual TEFL materials. I figured they were just pocketing our money.  I was more annoyed when I looked out the window to see this head lady's mercedes. She stopped by school today with a layout of a 10 day TEFL training. Again we asked if there were actual materials. She claimed yes, so we will see what happens. 

Cailin and I had a Skype conversation with a lady from InterExchange about our issues and concerns. It was nice to talk to her, but again I felt we were just getting sugar coated answers. Supposedly she said that we are getting our $300 back that they got from our application fee. Again, time will tell.