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.