June 24th

June 24th – Having exhausted our supplies a day ahead of schedule, the group leaders had come up with the idea of us teaching the Thai/Burmese elementary school students. Everyone seemed quite excited about the idea and in the evening people were clamoring for more time to prepare lessons. Everyone except me, I suppose.

I am not a confident teacher. I don't mind giving speeches; they are set and defined, and generally well-preped. I don't mind tutoring either; there is regular interaction and quality interaction with only a few students. My lack of confidence in teaching large groups comes in part because of my desire for learning to be fun, or at least not boring. I consider myself lucky because I find many forms of learning enjoyable. However, I know that many students are not lucky in this way.

Many of the other participants were coming up with elaborate lesson plans. Meanwhile, my partner, Laura, and I were considering math. Math is the international language after all. With only forty-five minutes to teach it seemed easier than anything that would involve translation. Plus, there are some fun math games, like “around the world.” (I take that back. “Around the world” is a terrible math game if you don't like math. I must have liked it because I was good at it.)

The first class we taught was a group of third graders. We began by introducing ourselves and then continued by asking a few students to tell us their name. Bad move. Those kids clammed up fast, and it was obvious that singling students to speak up was not going to be well received. Scratching ten minutes off of our mental lesson plan, we moved on to the rest of our sketchy plan which consisted mostly of math and a little bit about expressions and conversational English.

We went through numbers in English, which the students knew readily up to ten and less readily up to twenty. Using that range of integers, I wrote math problems upon the blackboard and we asked students to volunteer the answers. Like a vanishing act, their quick recitation of Arabic numeral is English disappeared.

I have heard that it is near impossible for people to perform mathematic calculations in anything other than their mother-tongue. From the faces of the students, it was clear that they had no problem with the calculations. The questions involved nothing more complex than a multiplication sign and they could say the answer in Thai. The problem was in translating to English.

In an attempt to keep things entertaining (and educational), we moved on to conversational English. However, our conversation plan had no interaction component, so it ended up being the two of us talking in what was probably incomprehensible American English. Then we tried expressions of the question “How are you?” This was also dismal due to our terrible visual aid of crappy chalk face drawings.

Exhausting our lesson plan with speed, we defaulted to a song we were hearing a few doors down, “Head, shoulders, knees, and toes.” The song was entertaining, but I couldn't think of anything except how horribly this lesson was going.

I thought about every substitute teacher that my former classmates had torn to shreds. That air of frightfulness and inexperience that make substitute teachers so ripe for sacrifice, we were perspiring it in buckets. A few more minutes of this and we would lose all semblance of being teachers.

In my own panic, I suggested we go back to math problems. This time instead of asking students to answer verbally, we would just ask the students to write the answer. It wasn't teaching, but it was easy and somewhat entertaining. Plus, it allowed us to regain the attention of the class.

Then Laura, my partner in inexperience, came up with a brilliant idea of letting students choose the victims of our math problems. Using an orange as a “hot potato” students quickly moved the fruit from desk to desk hoping not to be the one holding it when we called out “stop.” The game turned out to be quite entertaining and the last ten minutes flew by.

All in all, that first class was excruciatingly painful in its lack of preparedness, but each successive class became easier. We quickly learned that oranges lasted only a few minutes before becoming inedible and unusable. We also let the students start to write the next problem after answering a question.

We weren't even trying to teach new material. We were simply monitoring a game.

We watched as a class of first graders tried to outdo one another by making supposedly hard addition problems with more and more zeros trailing the leading digit. Students giggled and laughed. They shrieked when the “hot potato” landed on their desk, and furtively tried to pass it on to another student.

I doubt that they learned much new for the forty-five minutes that we took over their classrooms. Still, they had fun and I had fun, and maybe for some students that is not something that happens frequently.