You can teach them, but DO NOT, under any circumstances, TOUCH them!

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December 10th 2008

Published: December 10th 2008

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lkrhoads

I think his face is adorable

Our TEFL classes and our teaching practice were all held at a temple school, where young monks study all subjects, including the dharma (Buddhist teachings). This was a pretty special experience, and probably one of the best things about our TEFL training.

The boys at this temple school are novice monks and they are all either orphaned or from poor families. It is normal for most (if not all) males in Thai society to spend some amount of time as a monk; I guess it is a right of passage. Even Thai kings follow this protocol.

The boys at the school follow some of the same rules as fully-ordained monks. For example, they can’t touch or be touched by a woman, even a sister, though I was told previously that they may hug their mothers. They do not eat anything after 12 noon, which seems very difficult to me, but I guess they also go to bed pretty early and get up quite early as well.

It quickly became almost routine to be among the saffron-clad all day every day. Some of them spoke English quite well and were anxious to practice it with us at every opportunity.

Pretty classroom

We spent time on breaks and in between classes chatting with the boys at the tables in front of the school. Some of them were eager to discuss Obama and the U.S. elections!

One of my favorite things about teaching in Thailand is bare feet! I love to go around barefoot, so it works quite nicely for me that at the temple school, as well as my school in Chonburi, everyone's shoes are deposited at the door on the way in. It still felt rather odd at first, but we were quick to adjust and it is certainly more comfortable than feet crammed into stuffy dress shoes all day.

Besides the monks, one of the other main attractions were the free-roaming dogs and cats at the school. We spent a lot of time ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the "puppy" pile-- 10 very young and adorable little puppies! The dogs and cats could roam freely through the classrooms, and the favorite cat was christened "Mr. Kittles," by our group, though he was, in fact, a she.

The rule about women not being able to touch monks even extends to handing them things, so any time we wanted to

Expanding the vocabulary

Can you see the sweat stains on my belly?

hand them a piece of paper, or chalk to write on the board, we had to set it down in front of them. A bit awkward at times, especially because the Basic Model relies a lot on handing out pictures of key vocabulary terms at several different points in the lesson. But, as always, we quickly adjusted to these cultural norms for the most part, although there were some occasional slip-ups.

We did our teaching practice in front of a TEFL observer and 3 or 4 of our classmates and had feedback sessions at the end of each day, that provided a lot of good time for self-reflection and evaluation, as well as insights from our peers. I thought that most everyone (that I observed) did a nice job during teaching practice and the group was good about giving positive feedback as well as constructive criticism. It was obvious that some people were very nervous at the start, but it seemed that most of the those people relaxed into the role as they went along.

It was hard to believe that three weeks went by so quickly, but that we had squeezed so much in in such a