The Friday Feeling

Having always worked weekends the whole way through college, I have never experienced the Friday feeling until now. Today, Friday 9th of November, I finished my first full week as a teacher. Overall, I am very pleased. I didnt loose any children, or have any injuries as a result of them running around like a wound up toy. I managed to keep them all in the classroom, I had about 70% of their attention, and I didn't make a complete arse of myself. I think for the minute, I can be proud of that.

Although, today didnt go so well. I suppose in every job there are parts of it that test you, and today my last class was my test. A 5th year class, who should have a decent enough grasp of English, who didnt know the words 'brother' or 'sister'. Even after 10 minutes of drawing out stick figures of my family with their titles (a have suddenly acquired a big brother named Mark by the way, in case any of you haven't met him yet), they still hadnt grasped the concept. Not to mention the fact that they answered all my questions in Thai bar yes and no, and spoke to each other every time I addressed them. Talk about banging my head against a brick wall. So, I came out pretty disheartened. Even now I am at a loss as to what to do with them, and angry that they have gotten to this stage in school without knowing the basics you learn in the first class of a new language. I have been in Thailand a month and I think I know more Thai than they do English.

So I arrived home feeling pretty rubbish, made myself some Irish tea and sat down in a grumpy mood to transcribe 900 student names into my roll book. It was at the point where I was about the chuck the whole lot across the room with frustration at the amount of tippex I was using (Thai names in English are reaaaallllly difficult to transcribe) when there was suddenly a teacher at my door. A group of teachers were preparing to lay out harvested rice on blue plastic on the path, and they were coming to show me how it is done. A few minutes later, one of the young male teachers who I sat in rooms with a few times in the last week arrived, and suddenly all the teachers were offering him to do jobs for me, such as randomly pump the tyres on my bike. To cut a long story short, I found myself 'set up' with this poor young guy by the older teachers who were getting serious fun out of seeing this guy squirm. I ended up sitting on the front porch, the two of us sharing a chocolate bar, a big bottle of water, and talking in sign language for an hour and a half before pure awkwardness at lack of conversation forced him to help me fill in my roll sheet. Turns out its handy to have someone around who can read Thai names. The older teachers were truly thrilled by this, and are completely convinced that they have done miraculous work for this poor bachelor dude (who looked truly mortified as he could understand what they were saying) and this lonely little white girl (who spent her whole time laughing at the entire situation)

Lesson learned today; don't ever think that moods will last in Thailand. The people here always find a way to bring you back to that Friday feeling.

Sawatdiikha.