Loy Krathong

A few of the teachers from my school, as well as
 the various directors up on the float.

Whoa! Two updates in as many days. I must have nothing better to do.

I thought I'd tell you about a particular holiday we celebrate in November - Loy Krathong.

    Loy Krathong literally translates to "float flower-arrangement," and it is essentially that - putting these little arrangements of flowers and plants with candles in them into the water, where they joyfully float and bob up and down. The whole idea is that we are thanking mother nature and forgiving her for making water dirty throughout the year.  The tradition signifies a sort of "rebirth" of nature and allows us to cleanse our sins away.

Leila and Patrick

Madness! The parade begins.

    First, there is a big parade throughout the entire town - a real challenge to the otherwise rather lazy Thai people, who refuse to exercise for any reason.  One of the Thai teachers jokingly told me that after the parade of Loy Krathong, at least 3-4 kilometers, the rest of the year is devoted to relaxing and recuperating enough to be in the next parade.

Of course, some of the more respectable characters - the higher ups and directors of various important establishments - get to ride out the parade on parade floats. But, the general masses of students from schools all over our province and the normal teachers get to do the walking.  The whole town is either participating in the parade itself or showing support from the sidewalks.

Everyone dresses up.

    After the slowly crawling parade finally reaches the park, a loudspeaker calls out whom, or what, the various groups are representing. With that, we are now allowed to light our candles and send the floats adrift.  Thousands of floats take to the water and a beautiful swarm of flickering candles light up the multi-colored flowers and decorations on each float.  Khom Loi, similar to Chinese lantern, ascend to the heavens.  Since Loy Krathong is also a romantic holiday, you are meant to float your arrangement out with someone special.  According to myth, if your floats stay together and reach the middle of the lake, you will have good luck in love. Aren't Thais romantic?

Floats take to the water, and lanterns can be seen above.

Yaya, the Chinese teacher at my school.
Apparently, our floats never got too far.

For more info on Loy Krathong -----> Click!

Details of Teaching

Welcome back! Its been a long time ---

I have been teaching in Isaan for nearly one year now, and without a doubt, it has been amongst the msot eye-opening experiences I have ever been through.  All the students have now finished taking their final exams, the graduating class have been accepted into their separate universities, and I've just one month left before I leave for Australia and continue my adventure around the world. I thought I'd go into some detail about my experience abroad as a teacher.

The average class has about 50 students. That's right, 50. And I have a few with 60.
I teach each class ONCE PER WEEK, for 50 minutes. If you know anything about learning a language, you know that daily practice is a must. Repetition is vital, and one-on-one lessons are very important.

Now, do some basic math and you realize that if I were to spend one-on-one time with my students, I would have less than 1 minute per student, per week.

The only other English practice the students get is from a Thai-English teacher. These teachers are in charge of grammar lessons.  They also have the English level of an 8 year old native-speaker.

This is honestly a shame and is a point in the Thai education system that is a major flaw.  It also means that whatever I was taught in my TEFL course that I completed back in the US would be moot for teaching in such conditions.  Luckily, I am free to teach however I like - the most important thing to my bosses is that I show up for work everyday and take a lot of pictures (no kidding).  So, I spent most of my lessons joking with the kids, playing games that made them use whatever English they knew, and occasionally doing actual work and writing 'tests'.

Students - the first impression you get when you walk into a classroom is that of utter shock: for the shear amount of kids and for how they react to seeing a foreigner. This is northeast Thailand, a region known as Isaan (ee-sahn).  Foreigners are scarce, and some younger people are absolutely, petrified scared of me.

Luckily, most students are eager enough to want to meet me and get to know this tall, strange looking creature from a far away planet.  This was true even of my youngest students, which are 10-12 years old, some of whom had never seen a foreigner before.  But, it did not take long to establish a friendship with every one of my students.

I found this on my student's facebook page . . .

After one semester of teaching that was cut short due to a rather terrible motorcycle accident, I returned for a second semester at my school.  This was actually not what I had originally planned to do: When I first came to Sakon Nakhon I established that one semester would be plenty and that I should go somewhere else for a second semester.  However, after the way the staff and students took care of me after the accident, I just couldn't leave them behind so quickly. So I resigned my contract with AYC and returned to Thatnaraiwittaya.

A second semester in Sakon Nakhon was exactly what I needed.  After a long break from teaching, even I was eager to see my students and actually do some teaching. A fellow teacher came up with the brilliant idea of creating zombies with his children - he allowed me to steal his ideas- so I decided to let my younger students create aliens.  These aliens would eventually have little biographies - simple stuff like what they liked to eat, where they came from, how old they were, etc.  The kids loved this idea and we spent 2 months creating aliens.  I wanted to sit down with them and make my own alien too! (Unfortunately, I can't find any pictures of some of the really impressive aliens - I'll keep looking and post them up for your amusement when I find them)

Now, a second issue in the Thai education system is the enormous amount of down-time the kids get.  Seriously, every other week we have a day off, or a special day for dancing, or a whole week to play sports, or, my personal favorite, a day long speech about how attending class everyday was vital to education and missing even one lesson had serious consequences. I had to give two of my classes their mid-term exams when their were only 2 weeks left in the semester - the other students had done them over 2 months before that. My students have often complained, even to me, that they rather go to class and learn than have to miss class so often for silly dances and sing-alongs.

Kids spent a full week making "EM-balls"

However, it is hard to complain when you get paid and don't have to work.  In fact, the educational system seems to focus more on students having fun at school.  This is hard to raise an issue with.  Students are hardly under stress until maybe the last 2 years of high school. Tradition is meant to be taught in the schools as well. For an entire week, kids made "EM-balls," or small mud balls that would be sent to flooded regions of Thailand and literally be thrown into the water to help the devastated area.

The school receives a blessing on its 27th birthday. No classes!

David helps kids make Christmas cards - with Buddhist children. No class!

As you can see, there are certainly some pros and some cons to how the Thai school system works. We could get in a long discussion about it, as I have many times with fellow foreign teachers all around Thailand, if you'd like.  However for now, you're just going to have to look at pictures of super happy kids instead.

M-1 students

M-6 students. Seniors

See you here again soon, I swear I'll keep this thing up to date. Maybe.
V