Random Thoughts #1

Sometimes you think the Peace Corps is keeping secrets from you: Where are you going to be placed?  What will you actually be doing on a day-to-day basis?  But then you realize that the placement process is such a logistical conundrum and that there is such wide variation in volunteers’ experiences, that there is no possible way that they could give you any realistically likely answer to these questions only three weeks into training.  This is one reason why is has been great to have current volunteers lead sessions in which they tell us what they’ve been doing, what’s worked, what might not work, what Thai students at various levels are capable of, or more usually, not.  It’s been a good reality check.

For instance, one volunteer told us that she was involved in a program to exchange letters with an American school.  Her high school students were capable of writing one letter (in a year) and never finished a second one.  She told us it was a challenge for most of them to form complete sentences.  She told us that she generally did not assign homework because most of her students simply wouldn’t do it (not out of stubbornness or recalcitrance, but just because they had never been accustomed to it, and/or genuinely didn’t have time outside of school).

Today (Thursday, January 31) we had a session about classroom management, and she gave us some scenarios that either she herself had encountered and/or were told to her by other volunteers.  These included: the students refuse to speak English and will not respond to questions or directions; the students do not stop talking when the teacher is talking; the students throw things at one another and the teacher (the Thai co-teacher only steps in when something hits the American teacher).  She made it clear that these were not malicious but were more or less normal aspects of Thai classroom culture with which we should be prepared to deal.

So far it has been and I’m sure will continue to be an extremely interesting exploration of cross-cultural communication and practice.  It’s been made very clear to us that we are not here to change Thai culture, but each of us will have to made his or her own decisions about how to negotiate the differences, where to draw lines, and how to effect changes in individual or collective practice and behavior (while working within the “norms” of Thai culture) that might benefit teaching effectiveness and learning outcomes.