Hello! My name is Elizabeth, but my nickname is Liz. I am from Fredericksburg, Virginia-which is one hour south of Washington, D.C...Thus began every class this week. By my third class today, I was ready to ditch my canned introduction for anything more creative. An acrostic. Or a haiku, perhaps? Despite boring myself a bit, I think that my first week teaching went well. Today was by far the most demanding. Saturday classes begin at 8:30am and are 1 hour, 45 minutes long. My first class (despite being early!) is a lot of fun; I really enjoy the students... and they seem to enjoy me. (At least, they laugh with/at me. I don't know enough Thai to be able to say which with absolute certainty.)
This week has definitely been a learning process. Even though I majored in English, I still have a lot to learn! First on the list is to figure out why you use an article to say "go to the temple" but no article when you say "go to church." If any of you reading have an answer, please feel free to comment below!
It has also been fascinating to see how different each class is. Some of the classes loved the games and engaged really well with the introduction material... while other classes were much more self-conscious about being "silly" in the classroom and speaking in front of their classmates. I assumed the higher their English proficiency, the more comfortable they would be in interacting in the classroom. That was not the case. As far as I can tell, there is no real rhyme or reason to why some classes are laid back and others are not.
Some challenges I was not expecting...
- I have a lot of students in multiple classes... this makes recycling games a no-go. It may be clever and fun for the first class, but it won't be well received the second time if half the class has already done it!
- Students are very casual about their use of phones in the classroom. Students of all ages (16-60+) seemed perfectly comfortable answering and talking on their phones in the middle of class. Something that I will need to address next week!
- Maybe it's the traffic, maybe it's the culture, but tardiness seems to be standard for the Thais. I had three students when I began my 8:30 class, and by 9:15, six more had come in. This resulted in me having to repeat myself numerous times... but I did learn that any relevant information that all students need to hear should be saved for the end!
- Trying to explain slang words... "Cheesy", "Corny", "Hokey"- the more I tried to explain them, the more slang words kept popping up. Thai has one word to say one thing. It's not big on synonyms. If something tastes good, it is "aroy"=delicious. That's it. No "tasty", "yummy", "delectable", "delightful", "amazing", "incredible"... only delicious or "aroy mak"=very delicious!
So I'm a little late to the game on this, but perhaps the reason you don't say "go to the church" is because in all reality, "church" isn't a building, it's the people of God. I have no idea how you would make that a clear idea to them, but that's my theory.
ReplyDeleteHmm, maybe it depends on if you're referencing the building or the service/people. (Because sometimes I do say "the church", like, "I need to drop it off at the church.") English is hard enough when it follows its rules, but once you add in the exceptions and slang it becomes hard to give people a satisfying explanation! Thanks for your thoughts on it!!
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