First English Camp

Sanuk mai?

This question gets asked a lot.  It means, “Is/Was it fun?”  Along with “Aroi mai?” (“Is/Was it tasty”?) and “Gin laeow reu yang” (“Have you eaten already or not (yet)?”), it probably accounts for about 85% or even 90% of the questions I am/have been asked.  I am not exaggerating.  O.k. this might be in part due to the fact that these are questions that can be asked multiple times a day, whereas “How old are you?” and “Are you married (“yet,” since the assumption is that you aim to be; and, if answered in the affirmative, the follow-up question, “Do you have children (again, “yet”)?”) only need to be asked once by any given person.  But if you throw these in and one or two other ones, they pretty much account for 99% of all questions I have and, extrapolating from the past 7 months, will ever be asked here in Thailand.  But this is better saved for a separate post, since what I want to write about is the phenomenon of the English camp.

An English camp, in case you’re wondering, is a one or two-day program of activities designed to both motivate students to learn English and increase their English knowledge and skills.  For reasons that I have yet to fathom, these camps are extremely popular here.  Some volunteers have already had 3 or 4 of them.  They are also a popular way to share and practice English and/or teaching skills and activities with English teachers, and even school administrators.  Although it’s difficult to tell, I think they kind of work as a motivational tool, but I’m not sure about how much students retain, since they’re basically just a once off, even if they happen once a month.  As any language teacher will tell you, learning languages takes sustained effort and lots and lots of repetition.  However, if the camp activities are worked into the school curriculum, they can work well as a way of injecting a little more energy and excitement for learning English into the students.

Our camp had 110  4^th-6^th grade students from our school (obviously) and three other schools in the area.   3 of my fellow volunteers came in to help out, and many of the teachers from my school also either helped out or observed.  In groups of 20-something, the students went to sessions on phonics, listening, reading, speaking and songs.  The activities were designed to be interactive and “student-centered,” and were led by 2 or more teachers and volunteers. There were also whole group activities in the morning and after lunch, mostly games and songs.

The date for the camp had been set a month previous, just before I left to go the Peace Corps Reconnect (a 10-day long training session and chance to reconnect, hence the name, with Peace Corps staff and my fellow volunteers).  Before I left I gave my co-teachers complete sets of lesson plans from camps other volunteers had already organized, and told them that they could look them over and potentially adapt them for our camp.  When I got back to site, which was a week before the camp was to be held, there was no apparent movement on the planning.  This did not surprise me, but it meant that that week (which was also the week that I moved to the school) was just a wee bit more chaotic than usual.  I kept trying to get a grasp on which teachers would actually be helping out and which sessions they would be teaching.  This seemed to change on a daily basis.  The same was true of the camp schedule in terms of which session would be held where.  I actually made final changes to the printed schedule on Friday afternoon before the Saturday camp. 

Since I’ve come to Thailand (although I was already sort of used to this from India), I have learned to roll with the punches much more than I had previously been accustomed to.  I generally like to have a plan, and I like it even better if it’s made well in advance of the event.  As a point of comparison, in my previous job I was responsible for organizing an annual fair for departments to showcase their various majors.  It was a 4 hour affair, involving 60 some departments and usually around 600 or 700 students.  It was held in March every year.  I began planning in December (having reserved space at least a year and sometimes 2 years in advance).  So, throwing things together a week, and really the day before, would previously have stressed me out quite a lot.  This time, it only required 2 or 3 moments of remembering to breathe.

All in all, the camp came off very smoothly, especially given that it was our first attempt.  There were occasional moments of chaos (a useful word to know in Thai), but no one was killed or even seriously injured.  The closing question that we asked the students was “Sanuk mai?,” to which they responded with a resounding: Sanuk!! With luck this will help to keep them motivated in the day-to-day learning.