Mai pen rai

Sometimes it amazes me how little work actually gets done in this country. Since ive been here i dont think ive had a full week of classes. There always seems to be something on or something to prepare for. All of these take priority over class as well which means frequent random cancellations. So far there have been the Sports Days (with a few days off beforehand to prepare), Big Clean Up days, teacher seminars for the thai teachers and now we have a King's award to get ready for. From what i can tell this is pitting our school against another one in Lamphun to see which is better. This doesnt relate in any super prize either as it just seems to be about bragging rights and prestige. The other school is a large school in a large town and we are a small school in a small rural village so we are underdogs here. But everyone is getting behind it so there is a sense of confidence about the place. Anyway from my perspective i have six presentations to prepare, 3 of which are Math and the other 3 are Science. Between myself, Goy and Noon (my co-teachers for Math and Science respectively) we got our kids sorted for their presentations. We got a few ideas together and i typed up their speeches that the kids were going to memorise. They are a stickler for memorising things over here without really understanding it. This is a bit frustrating as it makes teaching them a bit harder as they just take the stuff down off the board and memorise it whereas i want them to understand the material. So I constantly ask them questions which annoys them :)

All of this is going fine until i realised how important this award thing was to the school and also how often the bloody dates change. It started as a Thursday, changed to the Monday before (which sent me into a panic at one point as i had little done at the time) then changed to the week after. We didnt know when on that week till really late so i just aimed for that Monday. I stopped worrying at this point because there was nothing i could do about it and just hoped what i would have done would be enough come the actual day.

So the kids got an idea, such as using a pizza to demonstrate fractions, a script to memorise and they had to create displays out of this. They asked to do that part as they were distinctly unimpressed with my (non-existent) art skills. So off they went and i was thrown around as a jack of all trades helping with the other presentations, an adaptation of Snow White, some songs, help with pronunciation (frustrating), plan and do the odd lesson and at one point go through a verbal reasoning test my coordinator was preparing for. For this last one i was expected to know all the answers just from reading the questions (as a native speaker i clearly have a complete mastery of the language.....) which would have been fine only most of the questions were a bit ambiguous. So i made educated guesses! All in all a pretty busy week even though I did very little teaching. Now over the weekend we are working on rehearsals to drill all of this stuff down the kids throats so they are ready for the day. I'm looking forward to their rendition of Westlife's "You Raise Me Up" which ive been listening to all week (i think i know the words better than the kids at this stage purely from it being endlessly repeated). Oh and there is also the small matter of the judges looking to observe one of my classes in order to evaluate me as a teacher as well.... No biggie.

Finally I would like to say that most of the time I just smile and get on with it when everything seems to get pulled out from under me at times. Its all you can do because getting upset achieves nothing. I also have no sign of a tv getting set up in my room or getting a bicycle. Nothing happens quickly over here. But as we say in Thailand: 'Mai Pen Rai'