Just figured out video blogging, and since it’s ages since my holiday in Krabi, perhaps my mood at the time may sum it up better than my mood now!

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I received a call from my wife late last week, who informed me that she’d got me a teaching gig and that I couldn refuse it, and it would be on my day off. To say I was a little miffed was an understatement. When I then found out it would be teaching 25 newly-apppointed school directors, and that the request for my presence there was by the local area head of the MOE made me even less inclined to do it, but apparently I had to do it, so with my 3 hours worth of lesson plans, yesterday off I went to the school hosting the seminar.

True to form all the male Directrors were hardcore Chang drinkers and Krong Tip smokers and all the female directors were prudish but apparently a fan of English males (so they said!). I was of course the youngest person there at 30, with most of the participants well over 40. Played some fairly well-worn games such as the great Toilet Roll Fiasco, then gave them a worksheet of true/false questions on the differences in Thai and Western (mostly UK) culture. I pointed included the fact that newly qualified teachers in the uk make at least 120k baht per month on startingwork. That shocked them. They were also blissfully unaware of the impoliteness that commenting on someone’s weight carries in the UK, and also surprised that us farrangs get the willies about umbrellas up indoors. We played a word association game afterwards, and then gave them some useful phrases of English in case they ever managed to persuade a foreign teacher to come and teach in what are mostly boonie schools.

What was interesting was that despite these people being heads of schools, their language abilities in English were little more than many of my Matayom 5 students, and funnily enough so was their classroom manner. Sure they got on with what I asked them to do but not with a lot of shyness, finger poniting at the next person when they didn’t want to participate and giggling. A pretty surreal day all in all, and not a gig I want every day, but I enjoyed I suppose as it was a break from the norm.

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