In February, we were told that we would start classes a week after we arrived, but the first Monday of the month came, and as we prepared to spend the day exploring Khao Lak, we were asked to teach. We had no training and didn't know the level of English that the girls knew, and to top it off, we learned that we would be teaching in 15 minutes - for TWO HOURS. We tagged teamed the first day with our two students and just a week later, I was pulled out to teach a lower level with all new students. Our classes go for two hours M-Th, and last 12 days. The students are graded on attendance, homework completion, essays and conversations, which they memorize. Most of our students are adults, ages 15 to 50.
Each day, the students arrive unbelievably early and sit and wait, sometimes for a half hour, for us to start class. We grade their homework (a list of English vocabulary words used in sentences) and teach everyone how to avoid the common mistakes they've made - ie, "I am a look." No, you cannot BE a "look"...look is a verb, it's something you do. Or this one: "He cut the rope clean through" (word was clean) - there is NO WAY you wrote this yourself, because when I told you what "clean" meant, I said it was used for scrubbing the floor or washing dishes, and so your sentence is too complex to be yours. "Kor yanlope noi ka (give me the eraser) and do it again." Or this: "To walk the streets." Who walks the streets? To walk the streets for what? "To walk" is the verb, but this gives me no information. Write you or I, and we'll call it good. Some sentences I just gape at, because I have no idea how to even begin fixing them, or have no idea what they mean. It looks like their dictionary exploded all over the page, and they grin with pride. Sigh! Moving on...
We skip over the part where you teach them an English song, because no one wants to do that, and these are adults, who would probably rather not sing Jingle Bells, especially when it never snows and Christmas is no big deal. We read excerpts from the Bible - they read the Thai next to the passage, then we read slowly in English, and then they read after us, being interrupted to correct their pronunciation. The most common mistakes are that they drop their endings, as the Thai language is quite lazy - they don't pronounce the "s", "k", etc. Then, they often replace "l" with "r" sounds, and vice versa (in Thai, this practice is common and acceptable). The poor things - we can hardly explain why "enough" is pronounced "enuf" or why "caution" is pronounced "caushun", because even we don't know why that is. English, though important, is "ting tong" (crazy), I tell them.
We discuss the passage which mostly consists of my rehashing the story in child-like cartoon characters on the white board and pointing specifically to the verse where the answer can be found. Then, we move on to grammar and sentence structure. Since I haven't actually "learned" this information more recently than 7th grade, it is sometimes difficult to explain why things must be the way they are. Both Derek and I struggle to balance the varying levels of English speakers in our classes. We have to pull some along and hold some back so that we can move at the same pace, but even within levels designated 1 and 2, we deal with variability that can be frustrating for the students and for us. But, in the end, we all get there!
Then, we have them do a writing assignment - something very simple, like "what you did this weekend" or "tell us about your family." This is a painful portion sometimes because after you explain that they need to choose 1 topic from the 4 options and write 5 very basic sentences, they all nod and tell you that they understand. But they don't. One will start writing about something entirely off topic while another flips through their dictionary for five minutes and never writes anything down. Eventually, you can get them to understand what you want, but not without giving a complete example of your own, which must be followed by a warning that they must create their own and not simply copy down what you've written. Thai students tend to be perfectionists, in a sense. They don't want to speak up unless they know exactly the correct thing to say. They don't want to write it down unless you've already designated it a proper sentence. Derek's class did a word scramble once where they were asked to pull English words out of other English words (glare - they write "large"), but Derek left our teaching book open to where I had previously written down those I had found ("age") and they saw this and erased their own words and wrote down mine. Both were right, and Derek told them that the words they had found were also correct, but erase they did, and my words were copied over their innovation.
We do a lot of pronunciation practice, and I think this is something that our students believe to be very helpful. Hearing a native speaker speak the English words cleans up the way they read aloud and create their own verbal sentences, which we really see a difference in after a few days. They laugh at the way we stick out our tongues to show them the "th" sound, which they never use in Thai. We repeat over and over the "v" and "x" sound, and explain that "six" (6) is right and "sick" is not...because they mean entirely different things. Sometimes for no reason, they'll stick an "s" sound in the middle of a sentence, and I have to stop them and ask them to point out the "s", which they never can find, to get them to correct it.
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