Living on the edge

This is hilarious, coming all the way to Thailand, doing an intense TEFL course in Phuket only to end up teaching Science in the North East of Thailand. I love it! Today I had all the possible emmotions in one day. I started the day off in a zombie mode because we went to Phatong beach and checked out all the beautiful Thai ladies with their sweat little bits of clothes on, only got back at 4am. Which meant our plan to go drop CV’s off at all the possible schools and hotels only started at 4pm. We went to ECC, one hotel and one language school.

Monday we will be kicked out of the place we currently stay at and need to look around for cheap accommodation. The stress and worries of finding a job and not making too much dept was starting to get to me. I kept reminding myself that moments like these are why I had to get out here in Thailand. To grow up and trust God that He will provide. I wanted to cry because I don’t know where to go or what to do. I had a possible job set up for March but I can’t hang around that long doing nothing. “Lord what am I going to do, what do you want me to do, where do you want me. Why can’t I rest in you and trust that things will work out?”

Then I was a bit irritated because different people tell you different things. One says: “Don’t go to the South. There are a lot of fighting under the Muslims. It’s no good. Then someone else comes along: “No it’s great there, I will love working there.” The worse is when people tell you: “Ag, you won’t find a job this time of year, hardly any schools hire this time of the year, wait for April.”

Later today I just decided that this is the adventure I was looking for. Out of the 25 of us who did the course, only 2 have a job so for. This is basically due to the fact that no one has looked for jobs yet. Most are still travelling for 3 weeks and will only start looking then.

To try and make a long story short. The contact I had in Nakorn Ratchasima who only had a job available teaching kindergarden children emailed me today asking if I want to teach science, then I can start on 10 Jan. Amazing, that will be more interesting than teaching English and it’s for grade 2-6. That is more the age group I was hoping to teach. How cool is that. I will still see what it’s about and I am sure they will want me. Haha, you gotta have a little faith in yourself because the one who created you has a lot of faith in you.

This is an exciting journey, living on the edge. I love it!

Teaching

Okay, okay here it comes. The actual reason why I am in Thailand at the moment: TEFL-course(teaching English as a foreign language. I have been going on about the beauty of the people, food and surroundings... that’s not good enough?

The course is amazing. We are having so much fun in the class. Today was hilarious. We learnt about conditionals (zero, 1st, 2nd, 3rd...) so Simon, one of our cool teachers would write the beginning of the sentence: “If I had a few days off of work I would...” so he asks the class to complete the sentence and someone shouts out: “get drunk”. Funny things came out today. “If I won the lottery I will... have lots of friends.” The most exciting part about being around people from all over the world is to hear the variations in intonation, accents and slang.

Other than being taught, we get the opportunity to teach as well. I have taught 3 classes with an average of 10 Thai students, aged 16-40 and two, one-on-one lessons. Each lesson is 43min in length. One of the one-on-one lessons was that we needed to recruit some Thai person and offer a free one hour lesson. This took a lot of preparation because we had to invent our own lesson according to the person’s needs and their level of English. It took me about 8-10 hours to prepare a 1 hour lesson. I picked one of the waitresses at a restaurant close by. I enjoy teaching it is great fun and we get evaluated after each lesson. This helps to see where we can improve. There are two requirements in order to pass the course one is that we need to pass 4/6 of our lessons. I have already passed 4. We have a grammar test next week Monday for which a 75% pass mark is required.
Time goes by so fast.