that messy teacher

you know that teacher who sweats and gets the blue whiteboard marker all over her face and her white clothes?

that's me.

both wednesday and thursday, i managed to give myself a blue mustache, and yesterday i was smart enough to lean against the eraser holder along the bottom of the white board, which put a huge line of blue across my cream-colored skirt. good job, nicki.

oh, well. the kids don't seem to mind or disrespect me for it, but then again, they're not the type to openly be rude to me. i don't have to teach today...my co-teacher told me yesterday that she'll be doing all the lessons, so i'm just going to sit back and relax.

so one of my activities has been to pair the students up and have them introduce their partner in front of the class. i thought this would be a boring activity and the kids would hate me, but it's turned out to be a riot. even my choosing of partners has lead to hilarity. i paired this guy and this girl up, and when they were called to the front of the classroom, the kids uttered a huge "oOoOOoOoOo!" i leaned over to one of the girls and asked what everyone was so excited about.

her: "they're both the tallest in the class."
me: "ohhhh, so they're going to be in love." (and i make a heart with my hands)
her: (squealing and giggling) "yessss yes!"

so i'm a thai match maker. nbd. later in that same class, two girls came up and everyone just busted up. i asked another girl what was so funny, and she goes, "they have the same hair!"

everyone here has the same hair. seriously, everyone wears a uniform and all the younger girls have to have their hair cut the same (it's at this hideous length right below their ears. tough haircut for a pubescent girl). these two girls who had "the same hair," i guess, maybe hadn't had a haircut for a few weeks? both had their hair parted in the middle?

another question i like to ask the kids is where they want to live. one of the most popular answers from the girls has been korea. in fact, the first girl to mention korea in class usually gets another one of those "oOoOOoOOo!" noises. so i asked them what was so great about korea. i guess there's some sort of singer or multiple singers from korea? my co-teacher tells me they have "korean fever." lolz.

anyway, i'm off to another day of class. this afternoon we get fitted for our thai costumes for monday. one of the american directors took the big sizes to america, so we're going to have to squeeze into some tiny thai ones. this will be interesting.

"hello, teacher!"

tash, maddy, and i walked into sanguan ying (school) today at 8 a.m., just as planned. everybody stared at us when we walked through the middle of campus, like we were celebrities. it was just like that scene from 500 days of summer. we needed more group dancing, baseball hitting, and campy music.

we were shown to our desks (hell yeah i have my own desk in the teacher office), so we sat down and started sifting through papers left behind by former english teachers. we were introduced to some other english teachers who would also be our co-teachers (typically they pair a westerner with a thai teacher for the sake of order in the classroom. westerners can't really discipline the kids, so we leave it to the thai teachers. other than punishment, the westerners are in charge). at about 8:35, miew (who is my co-teacher for my M4, or 9th grade, students) came up to me. here's pretty much how the convo went:

other teacher: "nicki, you ready to teach?"

me: "today?"

other teacher: "yes, at 8:30."

me (after i look at the clock and realize that's five minutes ago and i have a minor freak out inside my body): "umm...yeah, i think i can. i would rather start tomorrow, if that's okay."

other teacher: "relax, nicki. just play game."

well, okay, sure. that sounds easy enough. so i get all enthused but also nervous, so i sweat, but that's okay because there isn't a/c in the classroom so i'd be sweating anyway.

the thing about this situation that's most baffling to me is that it wasn't even that big of a deal that i was just thrown into my brand new job with little introduction. the thai teachers didn't seem to mind that i hadn't actually had teaching practice or that i didn't even know what a thai classroom looked like. it was just like, "okay, go on, start teaching. everyone does it. you'll be fine. just head on out. we'll help you if you need, but you probably won't. you'll be great."

and surprisingly, i didn't even do that badly. i used up all of my class time and my students seemed to like me, so it's all good. i did some simple introduction activities (introduced myself, had students pair up then interview and introduce each other) and learned thai kids are their own breed. for example, dark brown and gray were both favorite colors in my classes (and these are classes full of girls). when asked where they wanted to live, more than a handful of my girls in the smart class* said places like "belgium, germany, luxembourg, and "holliand."

since i only have each class once a week, i figure i'll get to use this same lesson until next wednesday. ballin. this teacher thing is the best. we also get free lunch every day, and next monday we foreigners will be participating in the holiday (koy kratong or something like that...i'll probably be able to explain more next week) by doing a traditional thai dance on stage in front of the whole school in the full get up and everything.

SERIOUSLY.

*this is really what the thai teachers call the kids in the gifted class. they openly favor them and like them better.

i'm so so so sorry for not writing for the last week. i've been in hotels where i had to pay to get internet, and i had other things to spend money and time on. but now i'm here, so that's all that matters.

the first week here was jam-packed of thrilling orientation activities like teacher training and thai society lessons and repetition. YEAHHHHH! sarcasm. the actual lessons were boring half the time because they didn't have that much to say to us, so they just filled up time by repeating what we'd already been told.

so the actual learning part of orientation was terrible, but no matter. i got to meet a crap ton of awesome people, and it seems like most people with the program are pretty cool. of course there are a few bad seeds, but you can't really expect an entire group of 91 people to be awesome all the time.

but oeg (overseas education group, the group in charge of the program) isn't made of pure evil. i know this because they planned this excellent trip for all of us to the grand palace in bangkok, which was absolutely phenomenal. you have to look at pictures. i can't really do it justice with words. (but here i go, trying anyway...) the entire thing has gold glittering all over it, curly doos at the end of the rooftops, and brilliant colors in between. the big to-do at the grand palace is visiting the emerald buddha, which is probably the most sacred of all buddhist items. funny story: the buddha is actually jade, but the abbot who found it thought it was emerald, word started spreading about an "emerald" buddha, and the name stuck.

so that was tuesday or wednesday or something (i don't know. i've completely lost track of what day it is), and for the rest of the week we did dumb orientation crap until we ventured to kanchanaburi for some elephant riding, bamboo rafting, and relaxing at a resort on the river kwai. indeed, we went to the actual bridge over the river kwai, then ate dinner at a floating restaurant almost below the bridge. this was all on the same day we hopped on the back of some elephants, took an incredibly relaxing raft ride, ate some delicious food, and spent the night drinking, dancing and swimming. the day was easily in the top 10 most perfect days of my life.

now i'm sitting in my apartment in suphanburi, getting ready for possibly my first lesson (yeesh) and writing what has become a semi-dull blog post. no real witticisms this time.

i have so much more to tell you, and i promise i'll have funnier/more fascinating posts later, once i can get on the internet more than once every five days. but right now, i've got the hiccups and i'm exhausted from a day of setting up new life. my rock-hard bed is looking rather inviting.