When I tell people that I live in a town that is surrounded by limestone cliffs, they either don't understand what I mean or ask for a description. Here is the best view I can give of what it looks like to drive down any given road in Phang-nga.
Speaking of driving...
This is my motorbike. It is awesome.
I wear a helmet with a racing stripe down the middle so that people know I like to be fashionable and safe on the road. The peace sign is the go-to photo pose in Asia so I opted to use it just to be sure I look extra cool in this picture.
When I wake up in the morning to go to work, this is the view I usually have from my bedroom window. I called it the Narnia mist.
The school's garage is on the right.
This is the school's courtyard/field (where daily PE consists of ribbon dancing or standing in a line, holding hands, and running to the opposite end of the field and back).
The walk from school to my house.
Never gets old.
Although I teach nine classes of 45+ students per class, I have quite a bit of free time after the requisite lesson planning and teaching aid creating (read: a whole lot of coloring/cutting/taping cut out colored pictures to large sheets of paper). You could say that cooking runs in my family, and we tend to be a bit obsessive about perfecting that which we attempt. So, I've become obsessed with perfecting the art of Thai cooking. I bought all the necessary gadgets and accessories and condiments (in typical Podell fashion)...a rice cooker, a wok, a frying pan, a wooden spatula, a giant bag of crushed chilies, palm oil for cooking and a refrigerator full of ginger, garlic, onions, basil, morning glory, scallions, shallots, oyster sauce, schezuan sauce, fish sauce and four different kinds of soy sauce. Getting used to the various sauces has been the most difficult part of learning to cook Thai food, especially differentiating between when to use mushroom soy sauce vs. light soy sauce vs. sweet soy sauce vs. sweet dark soy sauce. "Fish sauce" is another thing that I spent a lot of time grappling with, namely because of its name and pungent odor. Now that I've spent time actually testing how much to use and when to add it to the dish, I've come to terms with the fact that it's delicious despite being described as "a mixture of fish and salt that has been allowed to ferment for 1 year to 18 months."
So far, I've cooked every night for the past week and have tried a different dish each night. This was "fried rice with gai (chicken) and gung (shrimp)" night. My two favorite dishes that I've made thus far are a cashew nut and chicken dish with green pepper, onions, and chilies and a vegetarian dish with an assortment of vegetables (including a 2 lb. carrot...no joke), basil (two kinds) and ginger.
The food is great, but the dinnertime views are even better.
Now, onto the teaching portion of my life here. The kids are quite the varied bunch in terms of intelligence, maturity and motivation to learn English and I have the sense that this variety will prove to be the hardest challenge in being a teacher. The best part of the initial weeks of teaching has been to witness the students' astounding artistic creativity when given the chance to draw or color. Here are some examples:
This picture was not fiddled with on Photoshop. Those are the shades and colors some of the students were able to create using simple colored pencils. Pretty incredible.
The general drawing abilities (this is a 4th grader) are also incredible.
A 5th graders' work...not sure where she saw a kangaroo...but this was all free-hand.
Ok. Now onto the more humorous drawings I received. All of these drawings are the result of my instruction to simply "draw a picture" on the back of the basic information cards I gave to each student.
...Yeah. This is what I wear to work every day...NOT. I don't even know what those lace-up blue shoes are supposed to be. We'll call this "Teacher Becca 1"...
And this "Teacher Becca 2." Same same...but different.
I have no idea what/who this is. Ninja Bikini Motorbike Dominatrix would be a great addition to the riveting series that Thai television comprises.
I'm sort of afraid to ask to have this speech bubble translated. We can turn it into one of those New Yorker cartoon caption competitions...any takers?
This is the equivalent of Pokemon in Thailand (it's from Japan, but the Thai kids are completely obsessed with the character). The white half-moon is his "magic pocket." DUH.
The other interesting drawings I received were of action figure battles. This wouldn't have been so odd if the kids who handed these in had been sitting next to each other...but they were all on opposite ends of the classroom.
Red Bird vs. Gloved Ninja = hilariously awesome hypothetical comic strip.
"My favorite colors are green and red but NOT PINK."
Aside from the language problem (I have no Thai TA to facilitate translations between me and the students), the other challenging aspect of the job is that I only meet with each class once a week. Just getting the students into their seats and armed with a notebook and pen (two things that about 30% of them have deemed unnecessary to bring to class) takes about ten minutes. They are obsessed with playing games so the best way to get them to be quiet and sit down is using the bribe of a game. However, they seriously fail in actually understanding the concept of "a game." Take, for instance, the much loved Hangman. After a couple of rounds of me writing words on the board, I give the piece of chalk to a student so he/she can practice writing and identifying letters (yeah "chalk"...no dry erase boards here...my work clothes love me). At first, I thought to myself, "Be fair, don't play favorites with the smart kids who 'speak' English because then the ones who sit in the back row and draw anime action figure battle scenes won't learn anything." So, I gave the chalk to one of the back row cartoonists. He chose "soewul" as his word, or letter combination I should say. I tried explaining that we are in an English class and therefore we are not playing Hangman with either Thai words or made up words...that attempted explanation was also a major fail; after nodding and shouting, "Yes! Yes, Teacher!!" another kid walked up to the board and chose an equally nonsensical "word." Why would a game's purpose be "let's guess a random combination of letters that has no meaning"? No idea. Finally, another kid (one of the smartest in the class) walked up to the board and wrote five blanks. I breathed a sigh of relief as he began to write guessed letters that were resembling an English word. Then, after about two minutes, the class had guessed the word. Remarkable! My students actually do understand how to play hangman! Another kid walked up to the board, and this time within less than two minutes the seven letter word had been "guessed." Wait a minute, I started to think, what is going on here. And then I realized that groups of 15 kids were deciding on which word one of them would use before the student went to the board so the whole class could "guess" the right word without any wrong letters guessed. Interesting way to play a game...I think I shall have to give Hangman a rest.
No comments:
Post a Comment