Back in the Saddle

I haven’t taught in a formal classroom setting in 10-odd years, and I’ve never taught anyone below college-level.  I got out of teaching for a reason, or actually for a few reasons, one of which was I didn’t like being in front of groups of people.  So, as I stood in front of 20-some 9^th graders, I’ll admit that I wondered what I was doing there.  Fortunately, I had actually put a fair amount of thought and planning into my lesson.  So even though I didn’t know precisely what the students were capable of, I had contingency plans in case I had wildly under- or over-estimated their abilities. 

As it turns out, I was pretty close, though over the course of the two week practicum, it was more often the case that I over-estimated what most of them could handle.  In fact, the one semi-disastrous day I had was when I had planned a lesson on time adverbs of frequency (always, often, once a day, etc.), only to get in the class and realize that they had yet to really learn the words “year,” “month,” “week,” and “day.”  Thus, a few of my one-day lessons rapidly turned into two-day lessons.

The most difficult part of the teaching was not classroom management (although 9^th graders, even in Thailand can sometimes have some attitude and/or be fairly task-averse) but rather giving directions simple enough for the students to understand.  The Peace Corps’ position on teaching English is that we should teach only in English.  I can see this working at our actual sites where we’ll have plenty of time to build up understanding of classroom vocabulary in English, but during the practicum, when we only had two weeks to work with them, it was pretty tough.  Gesturing and other non-verbal communication can only go so far.  So, I’ll admit that every now and then I used Thai as a last resort.

All in all, the practicum was a great experience and invaluable for getting a sense of what being in a Thai classroom is like.  I don’t think that the next two years will lead to a career of secondary teaching, but I do think that it will be fun and challenging in equal measure.