Something clicked

This past week has been a pretty amazing week for me. It started off awfully because my Monday classes went horribly… “it sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays.” The thing with teaching is that it’s not the students fault when the class goes bad, it’s the teachers fault. So when all my classes flopped and my M1 students were running around rabid, as much as I wanted to blame the students, I knew it was my own failure as a teacher and so I was pretty hard on myself. I was so stressed out that after school I skipped playing sports with the kids and went home right away and went for a run. I put on my headphones, the first time I’ve worn headphones on a run here in Thailand, and took off. I ran as hard as I could and farther than I have ever gone. I was in the middle of no where far from anyone and was glad. I guess the stress of living and teaching in a foreign culture had finally caught up with me and so I just needed to be alone. I sat looking out over a rice field at the mountains in Laos and regrouped myself by praying/meditating.

Since that point on I have had the best week I have ever had teaching and I’ve just been high on life. Something just clicked with my lesson planning and it made all the difference in the world. My M1 students actually sat down, took notes, and participated instead of running around, playing musical chairs when I wrote something on the board, or hopping out the window to go hang out. But more importantly, the students and I had fun together in class and they actually learned something. I have promised myself that I will never become that awful boring teacher that everyone one has had who made you hate school. I have promised myself that I will be the best teacher that I can and that my students will always enjoy learning in my class. I know that’s setting the standard pretty high but I remember having a few teachers who could do that, and they really had an impact on my life. I was never a studious student but there were some teachers who could make you want to learn. I want to have that same type of impact on all the kids that I teach.

Up until this week though, I was questioning whether I was able to do that. But now, there’s no doubt in my mind that I can become the teacher that I have promised myself that I would be, it is just going to take a lot of work. And the best part is that I had so much fun! All the positive energy from my classes has stayed with me all day/ all week. It’s an amazing feeling to get that type of enjoyment out of your job and it has made it worth all the hard work/ challenges that I have had to over come to be here in Thailand, in the middle of no where in my little rice farming village.