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My First
Ever Lesson
In Thailand
Do
you remember the moment? The ink is still wet on your brand new
teacher training certificate and you're suddenly faced with the
prospect of standing in front of your first ever class and dishing
up hearty portions of education and entertainment. We asked for your
first lesson in Thailand memories. Were you as cool as a
cucumber....or absolutely bricking it?
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Bangkok Phil
I remember my first lesson in Thailand very clearly. It was in
the early 90's and I had joined Berlitz to do purely a bit of
part-time evening work. I'm guessing that it was about 6.15 in
the evening and armed with all the knowledge that a two-hour
training session on the Berlitz method can give you, I found
myself standing up in front of four middle-aged Thai-Chinese
brothers and sisters from a family textile business. Basically I
was teaching them the difference between uncountable and
countable nouns by showing them a picture of empty glasses and
bottles half-filled with water (a few glasses, a little water,
etc, etc) Well, it seemed useful at the time. I do remember that
they were very low level students. Berlitz also had a method of
filling out the student cards with the purpose of learning
English. In the case of these four guys, it was the irritatingly
vague 'for travel'. I pondered on the fact that when you're
standing in the middle of Belgrade railway station and wondering
where the hell your platform is, then the ability to say 'Mr
Manzini has a few cigarettes' struck me as missing the mark
somewhat. Anyway, they complemented me on a 'wonderful' lesson
and they were never seen again.
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Haltest
My first ever class was teaching IELTS. No
problem teaching Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening
skills with no idea at all what the hell IELTS was. It was a
three hour class when the most I had ever taught before on my
celta was 40 minutes or an hour.
Lucky I had had a few days to read through the textbook, but the
students still knew more about the exam than I did. Got through
the first hour and a half ok, scuttled off to graba coffee and
extend the 15 minute break for as long as I could and wished I
could extend the break to cover the rest of the class.
Eventually I had to go back and all the students were already
sitting back at their desks waiting for me. I went in played a
game or 2 with them and somehow survived to the end of the
class. Then the next day I had to go back and do it again.
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Unwell
The first time i was put in front of
students with a whiteboard behind me could certainly not be
classed as a lesson and the only thing learnt was by me- this
gig sucks!
I was terrified, sweating, couldn't talk any slower than a race
horse commentator and pretty much forgot the English language. a
horrible experience that only good people could get me to
repeat. i did and it was little better but slowly, and slowly it
got better. Now I grandstand in front of students and (most of
the time) i love it!
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Keegan
M2 students in a gov't school. Knocked on the door on Friday.
Told to start the following Monday. At that stage I hadn't even
done my TESOL. Nervous as shit, and so were the kids. Taught the
verb to be for about 20 minutes, then went to hangman.
Here I was with my BA (Eng), never having taught in a school
before, trying to occupy an hour.
Don't think I've ever studied as hard as I did for the next
three weeks. BA in Eng! Nothing compared to trying to bluff my
way through that first lesson.
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LDMA
On
first coming to Thailand some 3.5 years ago, I arrived too late
for the main hiring season so all the good jobs in Songkhla had
already gone. I ended up at this private "polytechnic" who only
got the students no-one else wanted and paid 200 baht per hour
for a grand total of 12 hours per week.
Confronted by 40 x 21 year old students with very little ability
in English, I decided I wanted to learn their names, so I
decided to use my newly-acquired digital camera to take pics of
all the students Each student had to come out to the front write
their name on a bit of paper and tell me their names, age, where
they live, their favourite colour and their favourite food
before snapping them.
The first student announced her name, and said her favourite
colour was "brue colour" and her favourite food was "noodle."
10 students later, we hadn't moved from blue or noodles. 10
students later we had an extra item on the menu "som tam"
(hadn't a clue what it was), and finally I clicked on at the
total lack of imagination and banned repeated words. Wasn't a
disaster, but that one class taught me 50% of what I needed to
know about Thai students.
Also note from the pic below that asking students to write their
names on pieces of paper for photographing is a silly idea, as
they all wrote their name tiny, and the flash rendered the signs
invisible...the next class I got them to write their names on
the board
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M4
class. 1999. Introducing oneself (speaking). I had no idea that
their English was THAT bad.
I asked them to write something about themselves and I scratched
my head when they would end some of their sentences with a tag
phrase "yes or no?" (chai mai?) only for me to realize that what
they meant was something like "...isn't it?"
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Beausawnlaaw
It was in 1995 at ECC Nontaburi.
Had to teach present continuous tense to about 6, 18 year old
beautiful girls. I was terrified as I didn't know what the hell
it was until the night before. I remember practising in my shit
guest house on KSR after half a dozen Changs myself miming
"driving a tuk tuk", "eating somtam", "singing" etc.
It was a terrible lesson, but the girls had a good laugh and one
of them started going out with my mate, lucky child of
questionable parentage!
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Peace Blondie
More like a demo but my first real class in Thailand. It must
have been the class of 50 M1 kids. I taught Sunday School to
that age group for about ten years, had preached sermons, taught
medical doctors and tax technicians, etc., so there wasn't
enough stage fright. I had a couple of ideas from TEFL school
(was given no prep time, no real intro, just thrown in for a
demo). They were okay. Then I was whisked to another classroom,
given ten minutes prep time, and it was 51 M4 kids, some of whom
were pretty sharp. The platform was multi-level with a
low-hanging TV monitor and a lectern. They began taking bets as
to when I'd fall off the platform or knock myself unconscious on
the monitor. They all lost the bets, and I got the job, which I
never should have taken.
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Marmite The Dog
All my teaching has been 1 on 1 apart from my practice teaching,
so luckily, I never had to go through the 50 bored students
sydrome (only 1 bored student!).
My first lesson was with an 8 or 9 year old Korean kid called
Dong Jae Park, using Let's Go 2. It wasn't too hard, but he got
distracted easily and would wander off and get things to show
me. I didn't mind this as we were still using English (well,
Konglish actually). Everyone seemed happy with me, but the
motocy ride back along Rama 9 was a bit hairy at times.
When I met my boss at the apartment block, my boss had another
Korean women with her who told me how handsome I was , but I
know that, because I've been told it many times on the soi near
my home....
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Asian Alien
April '99 in Ginza, Tokyo. Overlooking the bright lights and big
city I did the whole 'likes dislikes' lesson that seems to be
such a mainstay of the new teacher. I remember trying to elicit
for favorite musicians and getting "Dreams Come True" and "Mr.
Children" as a response. In fact the names of two Japanese pop
outfits, I believed that either I'd happened onto some
metaphysical dialogue or was dealing with a 'special'
student.
It took the intervention of the person I was co-teaching with to
get over that hurdle.
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Joe Beets
My
first lesson was in Khon Kaen. I'll try to keep this brief.
I arrived fresh from My TEFL course early on a Saturday, was
taken to my room, took in a little shut-eye, and spent the rest
of the weekend being shown some of the many local wonders by a
tag-team of very cool teachers from the school at which I would
be starting that Monday. A very nice start.
Sometime before dawn on Monday my brand new phone woke me up so
I could groggily hear my brother tell me our dad had just died.
It took a good long while before I was awake enough for that to
start to sink in, but I figured there was no need to rush to the
airport, as the flights that would connect to those going to
North America were just then taking off. So I put on my best
black clothes and headed into school to say my hellos and
goodbyes. The plan all along was to be introduced to several
classes and guide the students through question and answer
sessions, and I suggested we go ahead with that plan. We did,
and what might well have been a hellish experience turned out to
be anything but, and everyone, from the teachers and
administrators to the students, was simply wonderful. Looking
back, I was so lucky to have been in that place with those kind
people, instead of the spoiled Bangkok brats I'm dealing with
now - but that's for another day.
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Stricken
Mine was a catholic girls' school in
Bangkok about 2.5 years ago. The first lesson was with a class
of P5 students and although I was as nervous as hell to begin
with it actually went quite well. What helped is that I was
given detailed lesson plans for the P5 and P6 classes I taught.
Pretty good plans, too I thought.
The real baptisom of fire was the next day when I had my first
Mattayom class. These were double periods with no lesson plans
or materials provided. Well, I had 1 hour 40 minutes to fill and
about an hour into the class I'd got to the end of my plan and
then paced round the class gibbering like a fool. One of the
girls whispered to me, "Teacher, do you want me to help you
think of something?" Bless her! After that I went home and
planned a ton of stuff for the other M1 - M3 classes that week.
The other bad thing that week was when I made a student cry when
I said something about boyfriends - she'd obviously just been
dumped. On the whole though I really enjoyed that school. The
fact it was all girls made things easier - I've always found
them much easier to teach than the boys. Their standard of
English wasn't too bad either as I realised when I later taught
at other schools.
One other thing that really helped was that I spent a day at a
similar school the week before observing another teacher. That
was a great help for getting through that first lesson.
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 I
taught my first lesson two days after arriving in Bangkok. I
obtained a job at a Rajabhat university and was told that
orientation would take place on 2 November 2003. I show up to
the assigned room at 8.00 in the morning and a Thai teacher
basically told me, "Good luck!" For the next 45 minutes, I
played the waiting game . . . waiting to see what would happen
next. Starting at 8.45, students started coming into the room.
By 9.30, 78 students had entered the room, all waiting to see
what the lastest ajarn farang would teach them. Heck, I had no
idea what the class was about!
I ask the students, "What class is this?"
"Conversation!" they yell out.
"Do you have a textbook?"
"Yes!"
"Did you bring it?"
"NO!"
"Why not?"
"Mai roo!"
For the next two hours, I played the name game, trying to learn
who and what my students were. I learned that all my students
were English majors, two students were blind (and they actually
had the textbook!), all were third-year students, I was their
third teacher this year, they liked playing hangman, sleeping is
their favorite hobby, and that almost none of them could string
together five or more words to make a sentence. In short, a
conversational class nightmare.
The funniest incident in the class was final exam day. I gave
the students a 20 question exam that I reviewed for four weeks.
Each class session, I would put the exam questions on the board
and had the students recite the correct answers. I told them
that this was the exam, memorize these answers, and everyone
would pass. When exam day came, I caught 17 students cheating!
AND I STILL HAD TO PASS THEM! Unbelievable!
I stuck with the job till the end of the term and managed to
slightly improve the conversational skills of some students. But
I did learn the limits of my teaching skills, as 78 students
were too much for me to effectively manage. There were some high
points, but overall, it was an "interesting" and eye-opening
experience to the Thai educational system.
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Just Another BOF
My first lesson was at a small school in
Silom called BritAm Academy. I remember it was something about
introductions using my own stuff as the school had no books. But
the thing I remember most was one of the students asking me if
information was an uncountable noun and me thinking to myself
what the 'kinell is an uncountable noun? I knew I was cut out
for teaching when I said "That's an interesting question, we'll
deal with it in the next lesson."
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Early Ant
1987 - Universal Language Centre in Banglumpoo.
Remember going in there with a huge pile of handouts. Giving one
out every five minutes. Receiving confused looks from the
students. Confusing them even more trying to explain. Firing off
yet more handouts to fend them off. Getting covered in chalk,
and leaving the class thinking 'never again'.
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Dongintheklong
My first class I'll never forget.
I worked for a very dodgy "language school" (run by a rich woman
from her townhouse living room). The lessons were from 7am-9am
in a graphic art firm. My employer said, "you don't need a
book--just talk to them." Needless to say I did get a hold of a
text book, xeroxed several pages, etc. I remember sitting at a
big table with 15 very sleepy 24 year olds wondering what the
f*ck to do. It went ok, but I was so nervous I couldn't sleep
the night before. After a month of doing this I asked, "when
will the class end?" Reply:"it just keeps going..." Huh?? I
finally resigned, but not before drawing a chimney and smoke on
the whiteboard in permanent ink (it was part of the lesson). It
resembled an enormous phallus.
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Francis Bacon
Yes,yes I remember it well. The class was uneventful as I
memorised it in fear.. I remember looking round at the students
at one point and thinking "I can do this". It finished without
spectacle then I had to return a tape 'upstairs'
It was the famous old name for Thailand language school and as I
entered the 'upstairs' office the slink I was supposed to return
the tape to was performing fellatio on a fake male organ stuck
onto the screen of his computer ..well I thought shall I
interrupt his viewing? and of course being nieve I did. Handing
him back his tape I said "What you doing .....?" He never looked
at me in the same way after that we had to share an office for a
year too. Ah, the old name for Thailand |
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Send us those
warts 'n' all first lesson memories to philip@ajarn.com |
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