First School Placement

Note: I’ve been on a homestay for a couple of days now, and everyone could get wifi except me! So sorry it’s taken so long. Blogging will probably be pretty erratic, even at the foundation it’s hard to get signal unless no one else is connected (never) so  I’ll have to wait until 1am or something…

On Wednesday morning a van pulled into the foundation to transport my group to Chiang Rai for our first placement. The man on the left of this photo with tasselled socks is the head teacher for the next few days he’s our go to guy, whenever any of us asks a question like “What time do we start teaching” he laughs and says “Don’t be serious!”, I think that’s his favourite phrase, in Thailand there’s never any schedule, you just have to ‘go with it’ and be prepared to tear up the lesson plans. He, like all his students is wearing a scout uniform as that’s what they wear on Wednesdays.
 We’re the first international student teachers the school has had and they were as excited we were there as we were to be there, which was really fun. The head teacher (his English name is Jimi) took a photo of us all in the van before we got to the school to send to the staffroom because everyone was really excited.

The staff room was gorgeous!

He gave us a tour of his school and all the students wai’d to us (a wai is when you put your palms together and bow your head, it is used as both a greeting and a sign of respect).  We are expected to wai back to teachers who have the same status as us but not to the children. All my wais to teachers were conducted with my water bottle between my palms. I’m not sure if this is allowed but I was thirsty and didn’t want to go anywhere without my water!

 

The Thai sense of humour is cute. They like to laugh. So I spend lessons pulling faces, dancing round and trying to get them to shout answers back. At first they shyly laughed but by the end they were all dancing, even the shy kids (special credits to the kids that did ‘Gangnam Style’ with me). That was funny. We can’t speak Thai and they speak little English so minutes were spent repeating “you have paper?” and waving paper in the air to no avail, but when I said ‘Gangnam Style’ every child knew to start horse hopping.

Classes!

 

Our third class of the day were impossibly shy, going round and asking their names was painful, I couldn’t hear most of them. So we made paper hats and everyone wrote their names on the hats.

While on the tour the head teacher pointed out one boy in the class and told the group he was a host family one pair would stay with. The little boy (he’s 8) then pointed at me and said something in Thai, roughly translating as “I want her!” all the teachers and students laughed, the joke was lost on us but later translated. So that’s how Chandra and I joined the Chutimadee family.