Co-Teaching: Cheating for Teachers

I love my Thursday and Friday line-ups. Granted, my Fridays are full of classes, but three of the four classes I have that day are co-taught with Phi-Som. (And two out of the three classes I have on Thursday are co-taught.) When Phi-Som is in the room, the students are somewhat well-behaved. Though it depends on the class. M3/9 students today were as rowdy as ever, but half of those boys have their hearts in the semi-right place. I say semi-right because these were the boys who asked me for my facebook. They do put forth some effort in class, and a good 25% managed to memorize the conversation test and complete it. Some even stayed after class to finish, which I'm sure they never really did before. (Am I tooting my own horn? Just a little bit.) Regardless of that little piece of useless self-advertising piece of information, co-teaching is a lot easier because one person can man the disruptive part of the room while the other one teaches. Unfortunately, we don't get the chance to do that often. Also, co-teaching allows me to see exactly what these students have been taught, and many of the Thai teachers make serious grammatical mistakes (forgetting to put the 's's at the end of plurals, forgetting to use articles in front of nouns...) How does one correct that when the students don't really care about who you are yet? And how do you attempt to correct years and years of incorrect English? I don't have an answer for that yet, but in 10 months, I will!

When L and N and I rode our bikes (omg, we got bikes--the feeling is equivalent to little 15 year olds in America getting their first car, or little 21 year olds in America going to the bars and getting themselves stupidly drunk) to our coordinator's house to meet up with our coordinator (A) and two British volunteers (D and AL) to check out the Loi Krathong festival (google it, but do not wikipedia it!) We rode by a house, and I hear "TEACHA LIU, TEACHA LIU! HERRO!" I glance over, and there were a couple of my M3/9 students waving at me from behind a gate.

I run into my students a lot. They're kind of cute. Outside of the classroom. lmao.

The first thing we did at the festival? Bumper cars. With awesome remixes of popular American music. And rave lights. It is now dubbed "rave-bumper-cars". I think we've all decided to do it once a day until the festival is over. It was a lot of fun. I've got the bruises to prove it.

The weekend's coming up. I think we're going to go to Sukhothai this weekend (an hour and a half bus ride away?) to check out their Loy Krathong festival, and then we'll return on Sunday to continue the celebration back in Muang Tak, and on the 10th, please expect a crapton of pictures :)

And so, the 7-day Loi Krathong festival has just begun in Muang Tak!

That means 7 days of rave-bumper-cars. And street food. And carnival games. And cheap shopping!

Wait, what am I doing here again...?