I am teaching at Khao Pranombenja School. It is in the middle of nowhere. Well, it is in the middle of a national park and in the shadow of Khao Pranom, Krabi’s tallest mountain.
It is a government school and most of the students come from poor, farming backgrounds. There are 1,500 students and only two native English teachers, myself included. This means that I teach five classes a day and get to see each class only once every two weeks. Not surprisingly, the standard of English here is poor.
A Thai teacher helps with every class so there is no problem with the language barrier. Today, it was Ajarn Osot. She is a plump, rather mournful lady of about forty with curly hair.
“Your next class is a very bad class,” said Ajarn Osot mournfully. “They are very noisy, they do not listen to the teacher. Sometimes they get up and walk about the class talking loudly. They do not want to learn but they are here because they do not want to work on the rubber plantations with their parents. They are lazy and bad.”
I went to teach the dreaded class. There were 40+ students and they were certainly very noisy. I wondered why nobody here had ever tried to discipline them or work out what was wrong with them. In my experience, the students that are noisy and badly behaved often do it to cover up for the fact that they don’t understand.
I taught for an hour. I divided the class up into three teams and got them to compete against each other for points. It is a tactic that I have found works well for noisy and energetic classes. At the end of the lesson, one of the students from the noisy gang came and shook my hand and asked if I would like to go to a nightclub with him. There are strippers there, he added.
It is a government school and most of the students come from poor, farming backgrounds. There are 1,500 students and only two native English teachers, myself included. This means that I teach five classes a day and get to see each class only once every two weeks. Not surprisingly, the standard of English here is poor.
A Thai teacher helps with every class so there is no problem with the language barrier. Today, it was Ajarn Osot. She is a plump, rather mournful lady of about forty with curly hair.
“Your next class is a very bad class,” said Ajarn Osot mournfully. “They are very noisy, they do not listen to the teacher. Sometimes they get up and walk about the class talking loudly. They do not want to learn but they are here because they do not want to work on the rubber plantations with their parents. They are lazy and bad.”
I went to teach the dreaded class. There were 40+ students and they were certainly very noisy. I wondered why nobody here had ever tried to discipline them or work out what was wrong with them. In my experience, the students that are noisy and badly behaved often do it to cover up for the fact that they don’t understand.
I taught for an hour. I divided the class up into three teams and got them to compete against each other for points. It is a tactic that I have found works well for noisy and energetic classes. At the end of the lesson, one of the students from the noisy gang came and shook my hand and asked if I would like to go to a nightclub with him. There are strippers there, he added.
