First Day of Class

Dear D,
How come you get to be D when I'm S?!
This blog looks great! Woot woot. I taught my first class yesterday morning sort of by accident. The ESL coordinator wanted to know if I felt ready to teach and I said yes, thinking she meant Monday, but no, she meant in the next hour. My first class was M 5/3. I haven't figured out what P and M stand for, but P denotes 6th grade and lower, M is 7th through 12th. 1st through 6th grade are P 1 through P 6, 7th through 12th are M 1 through M 6. The slash and number tell you what section within the grade it is. I don't know how many sections each grade has yet, or if they're divided by achievement or anything. So yesterday I taught the US equivalent of 11th grade, third section.

The class itself was nothing like I've ever seen in the US. There was a group of students giving a presentation at the front of the class. Kind of. The group members took turns mumbling through a paragraph on Stevie Wonder and then a translation of the same paragraph. Oh, and I had to read the same paragraph with the class repeating after me before the presentation began.
It seemed pretty ineffective and I could see that the presenters had spent a longer time drawing beautiful flowers on the borders of their homework than preparing. Meanwhile the rest of the class did whatever they felt like. They talked, laughed, played games, copied homework. It's ok though, I think orientation did a more than adequate job of preparing me for differences in the Thai classroom. Now I just need to figure out what I'm going to do with it.

Then it was my turn to do an activity, which I had to wing. Luckily, winging salsa lessons had prepared me well. I introduced where I was from and my family by drawing doodles all over the chalkboard. I was still pretty nervous so some of the drawings came out crazy, for instance Law looked like a worm with a face and stick arms.

Overall the class went well. By the end sweat was pouring off of me from the heat and adrenaline. I taught barefoot and the students came to class barefoot. We left our shoes at the bottom of the stairwell.
***
I finished reading The Girl Who Played With Fire! It was still pretty gory, but not nearly as appalling as Dragon Tattoo (which I also watched on the plane ride! Did I tell you that already?) It kept me up late two nights ago, because I was near the end and I HAD to find out what happened~!!

Not sure what I'll do today. I handwashed some laundry already. I'll probably do some lesson planning and try and get another volunteer to bike me somewhere to get a cell phone. Not having my own motorbike is kind of inconvenient.
Hopefully pictures will be up soon!
Love,
S