First Week of Teaching

Right now it's Saturday morning, and pouring down rain. The rain is very welcome as it is needed for the rice and corn. I have been an English teacher for an entire week now, and am exhausted. For the first three days, I was teaching three lessons a day. Then if you take into consideration all the prep work, I was extremely busy. I do love the work though. In the mornings, I go to the primary school which is close to HOB. Every day, I teach a different grade level. I try to make the lessons very game oriented to hold the kids attention...especially when I taught the first graders. About eighty percent of the students are from home of blessing. The rest are from the village right next to it. As you can imagine, There are hardly any boys. I taught things like "How are you?" and "What is your name" and went over the alphabet for the younger classes. When I get home, I teach a class for the staff. This class includes Suwanee, Melanie, Ing, and Nam. Melanie is about 22 I think and is quite good at English. She even translates for me at the primary school. Nam and Ing are just beginning. Suwanee wasn't originally going to come to the lessons but I've been making friends with her and she says she wants to be able to talk to me and other English speakers more so I invited her. So all in all, it's very difficult to plan a lesson in this class that will be at the right level for all of them. This week we focused on physical descriptions, but I might have to go even easier for a while so Nam and Ing aren't confused. I made little notebooks for the staff class so they could write down English words they encounter and don't understand. We go over these as a warm up before class. My last class is in the evening. I teach High School girls levels 1,2, and 3 on one day and then levels 4, 5, and 6 on the other. For this class, we read children's books that I brought from Portland and discuss new vocabulary in them. Malee, one of the best English speakers of the girls, helps me translate. Thankfully, on Thursday there were some changes made in my teaching schedule. I will now only teach the staff 2 days a week instead of every day and will take Mondays off from teaching at the primary school. This will make life much easier for me!!!