10 teaching days to go

Loving this whole teacher thing

The realisations that I only have 10 teaching days left is slowly starting to sink in now that I'm back teaching and I don't really know how to feel about this. Today I was sat in the office (trying to do work, failing and ending up stalking everyone's A level results- congratulations to my brother for getting into Sheffield uni!) when Seen and Mon, two of the EP1 students wondered into have a conversation. This isn't unusual as their classroom is next to the English office and if it improve their English to speak to us or Teacher Glen, no one really minds. So Mon walked in and shouted at me "Teacher go home!" which, at 10.30am was almost offensive- surely you can't be that bored of me already?! However it turns out after a little broken English conversation between the two they were asking me when I went home back to England. I got up the calender on my laptop pointing to my last teaching day and when I'd be flying back to the UK to which they both replied "soon!". They then returned to their classroom jabbering in Thai to the rest of the class but I managed to catch "Teacher Sarah" so I thinking about us leaving.

I've been so preoccupied with getting back to the UK, I haven't really thought about what it would be like to

Jojo doesn't look too traumatized by his abuse..

eventually leave all the classes that I teach. For example, I was teaching my regular EP2 class this morning when Shedah, one of the pupils kept punching Jojo the only boy in the class who, being a 16 year old boy, kept winding her up. I was absolutely cracking up at the constant complaints from him of "teaaachhhherrrrrr" every time she punched him on the arm and gave him a "wtf face" - I think I would have more sympathy for him if he was actually doing the work I set him. But it's the little things like this, one of the benefits of teaching older children, and the friendly relationship you develop with your students that is really nice and is going to be weird about leaving. Unlike teaching in the UK, once I leave Thalang Technical college I'll probably never come back and see the students and it'll be much much harder to hear about how the pupils are getting on. It's really quite sad!

Cooking at the market

After school we had play rehersals and after almost a month solid of hearing the same (admittedly very poorly written lines) it is STILL funny to see an overly camp Prince and un-amused Princess try very hard to look like they want to dance with each other (it's definitely the most unconvincing couple acting I've ever seen). It's refreshing to have this in my day though and break up sitting in the office writing a full 18 week, 33 page course plan on "Basic Mathematics" that my mentor Pink asked us to complete 2 weeks ago which, for the record, might be the most boring document I have ever read. And I wrote it. Then, to get food we headed off on our bikes to the market inevitably getting absolutely soaked from the torrential rain in the
process. The rain which waits for us to get on our bikes before deciding to fall. Typical.

Ate this badboy with chopsticks- been spending
too much time with Will..

Sometimes I wish our mentor or maybe one of the other teachers were there for us a little bit more. To be fair to them, they are all fantastic and if we ask for something they'll try very hard to sort it out but I feel like our experience is very different to a lot of ETAs. Where people live with their mentors, they are cooked for or people seem to be taken out to dinner occasionally by teachers at the school. Or the school will want to do something with them outside of school hours. Not us. If we don't find food for ourselves, we don't eat. Our mentor never spends time with us outside of office hours and many of the
teachers seem to leave us to just fend for ourselves almost which is very strange. I know I am at an age now where I should be fending for myself but sometimes it would be nice if our mentor or someone wanted to cook us dinner at some point or take us somewhere on the island. It's a very petty complaint considering a lot of the teachers are VERY busy (way too busy to consider whether some farrang girls have eaten dinner) and on the whole the teachers have been very welcoming towards us, but it would be nice.