Teaching in rural Thailand has been an amazing experience so far. The students are definitely what have made teaching so enjoyable so far, but that doesn’t mean that they are always easy to teach. The students are allowed a lot of freedom with little supervision and little structure. But, they are always happy and they seem to have more of that child like innocence where they are not so caught up in world around them that they forget to just be kids, something most American students don’t have anymore. They are never stressed or depressed. I have never seen any bullying or picking on each other. It seems that every one gets along with each other. So even though the students have a lot of energy and are hard to motivate sometimes, I still think that they are so beautiful and blessed to have more of a child like innocence.
I have become especially close to some of my M1 students. They are my hardest class to manage (often referred to as my rabid little he/she devils) but at the same time my favorite class to teach. After school, I like to play games/sports with the boys: Boy, Tern, Diew, Tao, Kong, Bom, Sax, Lit, Aat, Poochai, Voy, Kaep, and Bank. And the girls: Um, Tan, Diar, Jib, Priaw, Pan, Way(is actually a little boy but he is a ladyboy, so he considers himself a girl), Prang, Numfon, Auen, Ouai, Tes, Joy, June, and Bang. And yes I still can't pronounce many of their names. The girls often hang out with me at my desk in the teachers’ office. They like to play with my talking dictionary, look at pictures, teach me origami, teach me some Thai, or just hang out.
Recently they have been trying to teach me how to say “ angyong hah say yo.” They told me that it was the same same as hello. I had never heard it before so I thought it must be some cool slang like how we say “yo whats up.” At first they would say it so quickly that I couldn’t understand them so I learned how to ask them to speak slower. I thought I would be soo cool if I learned this phrase.
So today I was practicing with them saying it and they really got a kick out of it. Then Nee, the teacher who has been tutoring me in Thai everyday, walks past as I am saying “angyong hah say yo” and so I asked her what exactly it translates too. She simple said “hello.” So I asked her why I have never heard it before and she told me because it is Korean!!! Haha that’s why I’ve never heard it before. Learning Thai is hard enough as it is because the local people often don’t speak Thai, they speak Isan, and the two languages sound very similar. And so now I have to try and decipher a third Asian language, greaaat… mai pen rai
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