Just They Way Life Goes

Wednesday, 15 September 2004

Christy and I talked about things in Thai culture that we will just have to get used to while living here. I know other Americans living and teaching in Asia have mentioned similar stories about things that seem so inefficient to us time-obsessed Americans. I am getting used to being pulled out of the middle of teaching at a moment's notice (and when I say moment, I mean literally in the middle of your sentence). Yesterday, I had just started an art lesson on perspective drawing of plants when the secretary came to tell us that we had to go to the doctor's to get an exam for our work permit. I asked, "Right now?" as school was ending in half an hour, but yes, she meant right now. So, I grabbed my passport to go for an "exam" at this hole-in-the-wall clinic. Christy and I were wondering if we were going to poked and prodded here, but the "exam" ended up being a woman copying down our names from our passports onto a paper and having us sign it. 100 baht later, we had just had our physical exams.

But, you never know, especially when you are the disposal of other drivers, what other events may happen. We had mentioned that we needed to go to the Call Center to figure things out about our cell phones, and Ku Ai offered to drive us there, but then we had to take a detour to pick up two teachers who were at a workshop twenty minutes away. Our quick trip to the doctor's ended up being about 4 hours as we ran different errands, all the while communicating to Miss Matt, our Thai teaching assistant, but cell phone that we were not coming back until the evening so she took care of the students.

(A teaching aside: It's funny because as I write this, one of my students Prael is commenting on all the letter combinations she sees. All the students know the NUA phonics chart by heart and have fun reading the room, and Miss Mau's blog, for all the letter combinations they see. Just a nice teachable moment for all you educators.)

Today, we got pulled out of class to meet with a supervisor from Bangkok Christian College who informed us on all the standards, lesson plans, record keeping, and assessment and what we need to prepare for the Ministry of Education's visit. Of course, you never know how long a meeting will take here. Ours took about 5 hours. Although it was informative and helpful, the last couple of hours were spent sitting around with coffee (actually our Nescafe 3-in-1 packets) and cookies, without an agenda. I have come to realize by now that our formal, but not so formally-planned events always begin with a hecticness of sorts, as people pitch in to get furniture moved (and when I say furniture, I mean sometimes whole couches are moved for special events), things cleaned, and sprayed. When P'Thoy asked me for a spray today, I thought she meant bug spray, so I went and got bug spray, but she actually meant air freshener. Our events always end with a gift given to our guest, and you always need to take a posed picture of the gift being given from the giver to the receiver.

It's funny how some things can seem to take so long here, and yet some things surprise us. When I suggested to Ajarn Kansinee, our manager, that we get another file cabinet to hold all of our files and student information (which you would think would have already been made, seeing as it is already halfway through the school year here, and don't we need to have the addresses and phone numbers, and contact information for our students? I'm glad we haven't had any health issues I should know about. Thank goodness for only seven kids right now.)...A brand new file cabinet arrived to our office within an hour's time.

Yes, we still have a lot of work to create all of our assessments, our grading systems, homeworks, re-do our bulletin boards, and write up our "Project plans" (forms for extra field trips and extracurricular activities) and our "Instructional Management Records" - daily lesson plans - (the wordier the better here; the more educational lingo you can throw into a novel of a document, the more "official" and thus professional it seems.) But, at least we do not have to rewrite the whole standards book before next week, and we can just "borrow" a model one for now (which I would like to re-write as well because it doesn't make sense!).