Day in the life

A typical Monday

• 5:45 Alarm goes off
• Relish in the fact that I actually have 15 more minutes of sleep and turn off my alarm
• 6:00 Second alarm goes off (I just like waking up and knowing I don't actually have to get up for a whole 15 minutes)
• 6:03 Third alarm goes off
• 6:05 Fourth alarm goes off
• 6:07 Wonder if I can skip showering for the second third fourth day in a row 
• 6:10 Decide I can just rinse off and wear a headband
• 6:15 Skip rinsing off
• 6:17 Get out of bed and look in the mirror, decide I in fact can not skip rinsing off and hop in the shower
• 6:20 Make that good good coffee
• 6:25 Ponder why I ever decided being a teacher was a good idea (this takes a full five minutes)
• 6:30 Decide natural beauty is better, and forgo makeup because realistically I would sweat it off anyway
• 6:35 Pick out whichever past-the-knees dress isn't sweaty from the day before, as well as a cardigan because it is COLD in Thailand (this is very sarcastic)
• 6:40 Look in the mirror and decide this is as good as its going to get

• 6:45 Gulp down an entire pot of coffee and scald my throat in the process
• 6:50 Bumble down to Chelsea's apartment where she is sitting on her couch in her slippers that she wears around her apartment 24/7 because she is oh so Thai
• 6:51 Talk about what would happen if we just didn't go to school that day
• 6:55 Convince ourselves we have to go to school
• 6:57 Get on our moto half asleep
• 7:00-7:25 Drive to school/ avoid hitting/being hit by other motos, busses, cars, stray dogs, Thai people wandering into the middle of the street without looking/ narrowly avoid death
• 7:26 Wait for my blood pressure to return to normal and thank God that we made it to school alive for another day
• 7:27 Attempt to wipe the sweat off that is dripping down my face with my bandana that I wear over my mouth in hopes that it blocks some of the air pollution from getting into my lungs (it doesn't)
• 7:30 Get hugged/kissed by the lady who sells fish for breakfast outside of our school every morning. Fish. At 7:30 in the morning. 
• 7:30-8:30 "Lesson plan"/ morning assembly where I have no idea what they are saying but it involves lots of bowing/marching/sweating because it takes place in the blazing sun. There is a little part that is in English and still to this day I do not know what they are saying. Kids also throw up a lot so it's a good way to start the day
• 8:30-9:30 Fourth grade math
• Quiz each student on their times tables before they have to sit down (discreetly use my fingers to do the 9s because I am that good at math)
• Tell students to draw a BINGO board on their papers so we can play math bingo
• "NO rulers. You do not need rulers just draw lines"
• Students all take out rulers
• Try and speed up the process by helping them draw lines 
• "TEACHA DO NOT TOUCH PAPER YOU MUST USE RULA"
• Students start over because one of their lines was not perfect
• Wait for students to finish drawing their BINGO boards (time elapsed: 45 minutes)
• Call out the first question
• Bell rings
• Class is over
• 9:30-10:30 Nap Lesson plan
• 10:30-11:30 5th grade math (5/5)
• Tell students to take out their workbook and open to page 35.
• "Teacha math notebook?"
• No, math workbook. 
• "Teacha what page?"
• Page 35. 
• Go around individually to the students who are still taking out their math notebook and tell them to take out their math workbook.
• Wait five minutes for them to rifle through their desks and locate their math workbook
• While I am waiting, the rest of the class has decided it is play time and start running around the classroom hitting each other with rulers
• Chase the kids who are running around the room and tell them to sit down
• Go back to the students who have simply forgotten they are looking for their math workbooks in their desk, and try and find their workbook
• Make a fool out of myself by trying to explain math to kids with limited English. Lots of hand motions/dances 

• 11:30-12:30 LUNCH
• Walk to get lunch at a stand by our school. We eat kai geow (omelet with rice) every day. Every. Day. Maybe once every two weeks we will get something different like chicken and rice or curry but every time we don't eat it I feel incomplete. 
• 12:30-12:45 Vocabulary
• I try and explain words that my 32 6th graders have picked out from their textbooks that they "don't know"
• Such words have included:
• penis
• vagina
• scrotum
• sperm
• testes
• gonorrhea 
• So vocab is always really fun and not awkward at all
• 12:45- 1:30 Other 5th grade math (5/6)
• Organized chaos 
• 1/3 of the class are at a 7th grade math level
• 1/3 of the class struggles with 2+2
• 1/3 of the class has ADD so severe it takes them the entire class to finish a single problem. I do not exaggerate. I applaud them when they finish three problems.
• Nutt #1 stares into space the entire time and when I ask her what number she is on she gets distracted before even answering me
• Nutt #2 is hanging off my arm talking to me while I am trying to teach
• Peepo sips his water out of his water-bottle's cap with his pinky raised and I laugh every single time
• Tor is an angel who wears his pants up to his neck
• Toang (I don't know if I should pronounce is Tang or Tong so I just call him TangTong) is running around the room because he is the first one finished 
• Ong must have 20/20 vision because I need a magnifying glass to read his writing

• They also refuse to use pencil so when they get an answer wrong which is 80% of the time they get out their "liquid" and white out the entire page and then have to wait for it to dry
• Liquid is the bane of my existence 
• Class is dismissed 
• 1:30-2:30 Grade and initial the 50+ workbook/notebooks I have collected throughout the day. "Teacha I want your swish swish swish!" I imagine this is how famous people feel when they have to autograph things. I am famous.
• 2:30-3:30 Conversation class with my 6th grade
• I used to hate this class because it's the last one on a Monday and my class loves to annoy the hell out of me but they are so funny they always put me in a good mood
• My greatest teaching moment to this day was when we were playing pictionary and I asked someone to draw Kanye West. 

• "Teacha I do not know who that is?"
• I ask another student.
• "I do not know Teacha"
• I asked entire class if they knew who Kanye West was. All I received were blank stares.

• "Kim Kardashian?"
• Nothing.
• I started a slow clap. No one joined in. 

• 3:30-4:30 Forced to stay at school simply because. 
• 4:30 Sprint out of the school where I almost knock down 1st graders in my haste to leave

• Moto home and avoid pedestrians at all cost (one time I did not succeed...)
• 5:00 lay horizontal for as long as possible

 Repeat.

Pizza on my mind

Upon moving into our apartments, we wanted to celebrate by ordering pizza and drinking some wine (“but Laura, you’re in Thailand, why do you want to eat pizza when there is all this amazing Thai food?!?!?” you ask, with a slight roll of your eyes- you try going two and a half months without cheese and then get back to me.) After realizing we don’t have any wifi to look up a pizza company’s number, we decide to try our luck at 7/11. 7/11s in Thailand are the equivalent to Starbucks in Seattle, or number of empty Zelko bottles/pizza boxes in our house senior year of college. You will not be able to walk more than two minutes in Thailand without seeing a 7/11. In most cases you will be able to see a different 7/11 from the doors of the 7/11 you are currently standing in. We have gone to 7/11s for:

-breakfast

-lunch

-dinner

-drunken snacks (Chelsea and I demolished a family sized bag of chips, four regular sized bags of chips, and two toasties in one night- I call it the Thailand Twenty literally as I am writing this our school manager just came over and asked if I wanted anything from 7/11...I secretly do but naturally will say no)

-sober snacks

-water

-coffee

-beer

-ice cream

-to pay our bills

-for directions (this neverrrrr works out- limited Thai on our part and limited English on theirs makes for lots of nodding of the head and laughing while we both are thinking we have no idea what the other person is saying)

I think of 7/11 as my home away from home. Thai people just call it “seven” because Thais and “L” sounds do not mix. You know that part in a Christmas story where they are trying to sing deck the halls? Fa-ra-ra-ra-raaaaaaa-ra-ra-ra-ra. It is so accurate.

After the first two weeks of trying to correct my students when they said my name, I now just go by Teacher Lala. 

Back to pizza.

We walk into 7/11 and use our limited Thai to try and ask if they know a place we can call to order pizza. After lots of hand gestures and failed attempts, we walk out of 7/11 empty-handed (save for a bottle of wine). We must have looked pretty dejected walking back to our apartments, because as we are walking a car pulls up next to us and the couple inside ask us in nearly flawless English if we needed help. THIS WAS MUSIC TO OUR EARS. No one speaks English where we live- not even the students who we teach English to, lollll I joke I joke. 

They get out of their car and we are so excited we basically just all start yelling PIZZA at them with a crazy look in our eyes. 

After we calmed down we explained that we didn't have wifi and the condo office conveniently changed the wifi password two days after we moved in and then posted this sign:

Okayyyyy iCondo, a little passive aggressive. 

The guy ("You can call me Bank" he said, and I hadn't heard English in so long that I tried repeating "youcancallmebank" really quickly back to him thinking that was his Thai name until I realized he does in fact speak English and his name is Bank) whips out his phone and pulls up the pizza company 's(literally called The Pizza Company) menu. After selecting four different types of pizza (he was so confused and could not believe we all wanted a pizza to ourselves) he ordered the pizza for us in Thai and even told us he would call us when the pizza was delivered. His girlfriend Koi, who didn't know as much English as he did, just kept laughing at us and saying "hungry hungry!". So hungry, Koi, oh so hungry.

Eventually our pizza comes and I have never been happier even though the pizza cost about a day's worth of work and was not even good. Blessed. <3

Koi and Bank probably regretted giving us their phone number after we called them multiple times while they were at work to ask if they could speak to our taxi driver and tell them where we live.

"Um Koi?....it's me....Chelsea..."

I feel like this is one of those stories that you just had to be there to realize how funny it was. But really it was funny. Guess you had to be there.

Scholarly things

Considering I am 2 months behind on my blog I'm going to skip to our FIRST MONTH OF SCHOOL.

^this was me. 

Even though I student taught in Pattaya for two weeks, I was still shitting my pants at the thought of teaching 4th, 5th, and 6th grade Thai students MATH (did I mention I was teaching math?) Will they be able to understand me? How do you do long division again? What is the communicative property? How do I use a protractor? How do I figure out the area of a triangle? These were all very real concerns I had, and I did indeed google them the night before. For the record, long division is hard and stupid and you will never use it in real life (I'm going to be such a good teacher!)

I'm trying to think back on the first week of school and honestly I think I blocked it out of my memory. I know I made the students make name tags with their nicknames on them because Thai names are no joke. A few examples of my students' names: 

Jirasak Jangjorn

Jittakorn Pothong

Papangkorn Rungpattaranakul 

Theerapat Rakusueadej 

Jirarat Wattanagasemtham 

Huschaporn Keawkajang

Punyaporn Prachayanonta

So instead of that^, they all have nicknames given to them by their parents which include, but are not limited to:

O-zone

Peepo 

Ah-ngoon

Lumpsum (Lump. Sum. A sum of lump)

Un-Seen (In the beginning she went by Seen, and now goes by Un-Seen...sooo much more fourth grade)

Goofy

Cooky

Kabtan

Pink

Blue (formerly known as BooBoo, but when someone told him booboo meant mistake, he changed his name to Blue- pictured below)

^stunna

Golf

Jedi

Ong

Piano (I wonder if her parents just looked around the room and saw a piano and thought wow, that's what I want my daughter to be named)

Zanta 

Smart

Pear

Can

Can't (pronounced with a British accent...)

G-yoon (her parents couldn't have named her June? G-yoon.)

I also have a Pang, a Pong (pronounced Bong, but I also have someone named Boong), a Pangpond, Mae Mae and Moe Moe (Mae Mae and Moe Moe sit next to each other and look identical, yet are not related) Poom and Pum (Poom's name is pronounced with a slightly longer "oo" sound than Pum) and a Clinton. Why is Clinton's name so normal?! So the first week was dedicated solely to name games.

The second and third weeks of school were probably the lowest I have felt so far. 

^this was me

I looked up flights home more than once (that would have cost a pretty penny) and cried more times than I do when I'm watching Ellen Degeneres' 12 days of Christmas Giveaways, which is saying a lot.

It's funny, coming here I heard nothing but good things about teaching in Thailand. 

"Oh my gosh it is LIFE CHANGING. Seriously, my life. Has. Been. Changed."

"I am a better person after knowing these kids. I hope I have taught them just as much as they have taught me" *cue glistening eyes*

"Thai students respect their teachers SO much"

"I basically played games with the kids all day, it's like I was at camp"

"It was less of a job, and more of a calling"

Some of these are paraphrased, but you get the point. Everyone makes it seem like a walk in the park. No one talks about the hard stuff. No one tells you that your kids WILL. NOT. LISTEN. TO. YOU. Mostly because they know you can't/won't hit them, unlike the Thai teachers. I have had to leave the room because my Thai teacher was beating the students.

 You will have classes where you will do nothing but scream, but no one can even hear you because they are all talking so loud screaming at each other. You will have classes where you want to storm out of the room (I have done that once or twice...). You will have classes where you break a kid's ruler because you hit it on the desk so hard to get their attention (ask Chelsea about that one). You will have classes that are cancelled and you don't realize it until you show up to the classroom and are the only person there because NO ONE TELLS FOREIGN TEACHERS ANYTHING. You will have classes where you are trying to explain something and no one understands because you are speaking in English, and you need one of the better English speakers to translate to Thai. 

You will have classes where you want to go like this:

And this:

And this:

You will have classes where all the kids run up to you with their books when they are finished their work, shoving it in your face while you are trying to explain something to another student (because they weren't paying attention, surprise surprise), yelling "TEACHA TEACHA CORRECT OR NO?!?!? CORRECT OR NO TEACHA?!?!?!?!? TEACHAAAAAAAAA" *eyes bulging out of their sockets*

Do kids do this in America?!?! It is ridiculous.

You will have classes where you are so tired you think you are going to quit your job if that means you won't have to teach another class that day. Especially because the kids are in school from 7:30 a.m.- 4:30 p.m. with a quick 45 minute break for lunch, as well as a 10 minute break where they chug milk and then about 10% of them proceed to throw it up. Throwing up here is about as normal as sneezing. I wish I was joking. 100% of them need to be put on ADHD medicine. Again I wish I was joking. Maybe I'll slip some into all of their milk?!

You will have classes where you have to make your students write "I will listen to Teacher Laura when she tells me to stop talking" 100 times.

You will have classes where you get up to the front of the room and talk to yourself because the kids DO NOT CARE. A fun fact about the Thai education system: all students pass each grade regardless if they know anything. And I mean anything. I have students in sixth grade who couldn't even tell me their name if I asked it in English. I have students in fourth grade who barely know what 5+2 is. But at the end of the year they are still going to go on to the next grade. So why should they listen to anything you have to say? It doesn't matter to them. Lack of incentive is one of the most frustrating things about teaching in Thailand. You can't threaten them with a 0 on a homework assignment, or on a quiz, or on a test, because at the end of the year they know they are still going to get whatever grade is needed to pass. If a student fails an assignment/quiz/test, you as the teacher have to keep giving it to them until they pass. If they can't pass it as is, you have to make it easier for them until they can pass. Even if you try to fail students, the administration will change the grades you have given them, to a passing grade. Why does anyone think this is a good idea?!

But.

You will also have classes where a student finally understands something and you can tell on their face they are so proud. You will have classes where you are laughing so hard you are crying because your students say the most ridiculous things. You will have classes where you explain something and the kids actually listen and are interested (this is few and far between, but it has happened!!!). You will have classes when you walk into the room and all the kids scream yay because they are so excited to see you (even though it's sometimes too early and you haven't had your coffee so you don't exactly reciprocate the warm and fuzzy feelings).

Phew.

Glad I got that off my chest.

I am happy to say after probably the worst month of my life (it was a very emotional time for me, I believe I went through an entire jar of Jiff my mom sent me in 3 weeks) teaching has gotten a lot better. Do the kids listen to me? No. Do they understand me? Sometimes. Is their math better? Yes! (Am I just saying that to make myself feel better? Possibly) Am I tired? Always. Have I crashed my moto bike yet? I've only hit a pedestrian once so I'm going to go with a no.

Shminterviews

After that nice little wake up call from Phillip, we moved into our hostel that unbeknownst to us would become our home for the next 13 days. Oh Joy (which ironically is the name of our hostel owner).

Our days consisted of waking up, applying to jobs, wandering Thonburi for something to eat, checking gmail for threatening emails from Phillip, eating a thimbleful of peanut butter, going to sleep, repeat.

After a couple of days of searching, Chelsea and I were talking to a placement agency, and when asked when we would be able to start, Chelsea responded "ASAP!", while I am trying to telepathically tell her to shut up.

"Oh wonderful! We actually have a school that needs two teachers to start tomorrow!"

Goooooood.

We get dressed in interview attire in 100 degree heat and after wandering the streets of Thailand looking for this school, slowly melting to death, some nice Thai man took pity on us and put us on the back of a moto taxi and off we go (not an easy feat to ride a moto while in a skirt).

Don't we look happy?? Little did we know we were about to enter into the worst interview of our entire lives thus far. When we walk into the school we are led to a waiting area where we are placed onto a couch for about 20 minutes. When someone finally acknowledges us, we are taken into a back room with a Turkish man who speaks little to no English, and after looking at my resume for about 15 minutes (in dead silence) he finally informs me I will start tomorrow. Excuse me sir but 1) What classes am I going to teach? 2) What are your school hours? 3) What grade will I be teaching? 4) Do you have textbooks? 5) How much am I going to be paid? 6) Is this you formally offering me the job?
7) Can I have a tour of the school? 8) Do you even know my name?

After telling him I would need at least a day to think it over (not fully sure if he understood me), I walked back into the "waiting area" and tried to signal to Chelsea with my eyes that we need to leave now.

After another 20 minutes I am told my interviewer is summoning me. I walk into the room where the interviewer tells me to tell Chelsea that I have accepted the job. Now we have to explain to this man that no, I have not accepted the job (was it even offered to me??) and in fact will not be starting tomorrow. Interesting that I majored in Communication yet this man has no idea what I am saying. Lots of hand motions. Anyway. We got a "tour" of the school where we walked into the classrooms and the children were literal zombies sitting at their desks while a movie played, and the teachers were all on their phones. Every single class was like that. The kids couldn't even say hello in English. No thanks. We hightailed it out of there, telling them we would "think about it".

A few days later we had another interview at a Christian school. This school seemed much nicer, but since it was still summer break we didn't get a chance to see the students. Emily went first. TWO HOURS LATER she emerged from the room. Next was my turn. AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER it was over. I would say it was generally pretty normal except for the part where my interviewer asked me what I would do if a student drew a picture of himself and said, "Look, that's me smoking crack!"

Apparently he did not like my answer because I did not get offered the job. God bless. Chelsea did indeed get offered the job but naturally she declined because she would have been babysitting teaching 2-3 year olds. 

Next interview. I actually wouldn't even call it an interview, more like they looked at mine and Chelsea's pictures resumes and offered us the job because we have blonde hair (this is not an exaggeration). We went out to the school which turned out to be MASSIVE. It was very nice and there was free breakfast/coffee (BIG pro...we almost accepted right on the spot) but one of us would have had to teach 7-9th grade and one of us would have had to teach 3rd-5th grade. There is arguably nothing worse than 7th-9th graders. Body odor. Braces. Acne. 

^8th grade graduation. Peep that dress and that hairdo that I spent 3 hours at a salon for, to end up looking like Shirley Temple. I thought I was hot shit. And those cap sleeves?! Fashion forward.

While we were deliberating on that school, we got a different offer from a placement agency that contacted us. We went out to look at the school and right when Chelsea and I walked in we knew this was it (funny thinking back on that moment when I was in love with the school, as I write this blog post 2 months later...). 

^pure joy...

We decided to decline the previous school's offer and that is how we ended up at Anubaan Nonthaburi! We came home to tell Emily about it and she eventually signed with the same school as us, as well as another girl, Nicole, who we met through Language Corps (trend setters). 

After living in a hostel for 13 days we were finally employed and ready to find a place to live! Which is an entirely different long and drawn out story and one that I don't feel like telling.