Thursday, November 5, 2009

TGIF


TGIF friends, family and well wishers! Its the end of our first full week in Dan Chang and things have wrapped up nicely. We are planning a weekend trip to the ancient capital of Thailand, Ayyuttaya. More next week on that excurision. After waiting for a few days we were given our final teaching schedule, so the planning and strategizing has begun. We are each teaching 15 hours, mainly English for Joe and Math for Deb. The students English skills are varied, but most are struggling to pick up their second language. It has been a trip to work with them on pronounciation and sentence structure. The best part of the week was having the kids create nametags for us. In Thailand most names are quite long and even for native speakers can twist the tongue. So, everyone has a nickname, given by their father. Our top 5 favorite nicknames we have had in class this week are: Man-U (as in the English soccer team Manchester United), Punch, Ice, Beam and Bam. Along with other classics like Bim and Book, the school is crawling with kids who have no idea the the chuckle we get from their nicknames.

Each of the classes averages about 40-45 kids and we now sympathize with any teacher who loses their voice. We find ourselves speaking more than we would like, but the plan is to eventually have the kids doing the majority of the speaking, we will see and report back to you.

Dogs, dogs, everywhere there are dogs! The town, school, whole dang country is full of packs of stray dogs. They are the favorite animal of the King, so no one is going to call the pound, more likely to call the local butcher...Sticking with the topic of animals for a bit, Deb and I hosted a small gathering of creatures last night in our bedroom. This was not a planned party, but Gary the gecko, his cousin Greg, Billy the Beattle and Marty the giant moth all made an appearance in our room in a 15 minute span. It was pretty entertaining until we realized that when we shut off the lights they could go anywhere, needless to say the blankets were tucked in tightly...Have a wonderful weekend and look for an update on Monday about our trip to Ayyuttaya.

2 comments:

  1. We love this blog, Mr. Wronka!
    Kathy and Riley

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  2. Graham and I are teaching at the same school this coming October with CIEE-thank you for your blog! It is getting me so excited! It sounds like you guys had quite the adventure!

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