UDOMVITTAYA SCHOOL

Gosh, does this blog make it seem like all I ever do here is travel around and have fun? Well, that's only partly true, I also work full-time as an English teacher.

The place of my employment is Udomvittaya School, it's a private school for kids ages three to fifteen. There are about 3,000 students in the school, it's massive. I teach the little ones, K.1 through P.4, or kindergarten through fourth grade. I have each class only once a week, and I'm not sure how many students I see, but it must be in the hundreds. And learning names? I've barely even started! They study English with their Thai teachers as well, but I'm their weekly dose of real American English. I'm a mobile teacher, so I move around to a different classroom for every class, and when I walk through the door the kids cheer and shout with joy! I think they like me.

My kindergarten classes are fun, but very challenging, the kids are sooo little. I mean shucks, they're still working on mastering their own language, let alone trying to learn English! But I guess it's the best time to start. When I was in kindergarten I only went to school for half the day - these kids go to school all day long, but spend the entire afternoon napping, for like three hours. After eating lunch at 11:00, they lay little mats down on the floor, pull out pillows and blankets, and curl up and nap until the end of the school day. My youngest class is really funny, they've combined three K.1 classes into one big class, so I have about 45 three year olds all at once! Most of them are a little clueless about what's going on, but I think some of the stuff I'm teaching them might be sticking.

I really like my first and second grade classes, I feel like I spend as much time laughing at them as they do at me. The pictures above are from a few of my first grade classes, aren't the uniforms funny? Everyone dresses like Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts on Thursdays, even the teachers, but I'll get to that later. Being a teacher is fun, but man am I tired at the end of the day. I've only been at it for a little over a month now and I really like it, I've learned a lot so far, I just hope the kids are learning from me, too...!