June Aftermath, Part I

Well, the first couple weeks of teaching here have been busy, to understate things! Let me give you a snapshot of the typical weekday for yours truly:

• 6am: wake up, shower, eat & prepare for the school day.
• 7am: sign-in to the workday, do some last minute photocopying & maybe check my e-mail
• 7:30am: staff meeting, prayer meeting or personal devo time, depending of the day of the week.
• 8am: personal devo time, except for days where I’ve had the chance to do so at 7:30. On those days, I teach ESL at this time.
• 8:30am: lead classroom devotions
• 9am: “Flag time.” Every student & teacher lines up outside of the classrooms, facing the Thai flag in the courtyard & we sing the national anthem as the flag is hoisted for the day. Announcements & birthday celebrations follow.
• 9:10am – noon: 90 minutes of lower-level English instruction & 90 minutes of prep time—half of the time, I get full 90-minute chunks… other days, I’m not so lucky.
• Noon – 12:30pm: “Lunch,” which typically consists of a mad dash to the cafeteria for tasty, tasty Thai food, where I shovel the sustenance into my mouth as quickly as my body can handle it, so that I have some spare time (usually about 15 minutes) to run off to the staff room & get some emergency photocopying done. Often—since the school only has one photocopier—when you hope to photocopy, someone else is usually already using it. On Tuesdays, I do not have this 15-minute luxury, as I’m on lunch supervision duty.
• 12:30 – 3:40pm: 2.5 hours of high school math instruction, with a 30 minute break sprinkled randomly throughout.
• 3:40 – 4:40pm: On Wednesdays, I’m on after-school supervision. Every other day, I usually start working on teacher homework.
• 4:40 – 10:30pm: Teacher homework with a 30-minute supper break happening anywhere between 5:30 & 7:00pm, depending on where I’m at with my homework.
• 10:30 – 10:45pm: lock up the campus, head home & get as much sleep as I can (usually 6.5 hours)

Saturdays are typically filled with personal correspondence & exercise for the mornings; teacher homework throughout the afternoons; and heading at 5:30pm to “Newsong,” the ‘underground’ church in downtown Bangkok, where a bunch of us teachers attend. Afterwards, we typically hang out for a couple hours at Siam Paragon, Bangkok’s most opulent shopping-mall, which is literally across the street from where Newsong meets.

Sundays have me up again at 6am to get ready to leave at 7 for worship practise at 8 at an ex-pat church in one of the more wealthy boroughs of Bangkok—Nichida Thani. A fair chunk of the staff make the pilgrimage to this part of town because it’s one of very few churches where the service is conducted in English. There are other nice perks too, like the church having a membership to the community’s Olympic-sized swimming pool, and the nearby Mexican restaurant which is pretty much the only place you can find food that contains cheese, sour cream or tomatoes. The GES staff are heavily involved with leading worship at this ex-pat church, and as a sound guy, I was roped in to help out the very first Sunday I went (the church basically only has one guy who knows how to even run a soundboard, and he’s often at church only every other week due to his working schedule. The congregation sees it as an answer to prayer that I’ve come along, especially since this guy will be leaving Thailand to go back State-side at the end of the month).

And that’s my week in a nutshell.

I’ve quickly discovered (and if you take a peek at my schedule, you probably will too) that teaching’s a much more arduous task than I initially thought. It seems that, right now, for every hour of in-class instruction, I have 2 hours of prep-work. They tell me that this will eventually trim itself down, as I get more used to the teaching gig & what actually is involved in instruction. Certain tricks of the trade get learned along the way, apparently, and I’m looking forward to that. One of the challenges that my position does have over the other teachers here—whether they’re returning staff or rookies, like me—is that I’m pretty much breaking new ground in all the subjects that I’m instructing this year. There is no curriculum for me to follow, no pre-formed resources, no previous lesson-plans or course-schedules on which I could model my classes’ pace or content. I’ve pretty much got to build the whole thing from scratch, which definitely is a challenge.

On top of all this, I’m teaching Math: a subject that I haven’t even touched in over 5 years. Needless to say, my mad skills are more than rusty, and I find myself having to re-learn much of the material in order to be prepared sufficiently to teach my students—who themselves are learning the material in a foreign language.

Well, it looks like I’ve run out of time again. Here’s hoping that the upcoming weekend will allow some time for me to continue painting the picture of teaching in Thailand. If you’re the praying type, I’d ask you to pray for staff health—there seems to be a bout of sickness roaming around the staff, and that mostly in the females as well. Pray for continued unity & for a deepening and strengthening of what currently exists. Pray that we would have energy and wisdom in conducting our classes and doing all the work that we have. If I could ask you to pray for one student in particular, I would ask that you pray for this guy in my grade 10 math class, Benz. He seems to be really hurting; he actively tends to remove or distance himself from everyone else in school. Pray that the words & love of Christ might become sustenance and life to him in spite of his current situation.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Here’s a gold star, just for you. *