The joys of working for free

So, last night, I stayed up until midnight drawing pictures with felt tip pens for flashcards, and then got up at 6.3oam today to go to school. I swear, I never worked this hard when I was actually getting paid.Today we all headed up by redtruck to some very small and rainy village in the mountains to teach some kids at a childrens' home at the first day of saturday school. First lesson was a bit of a disaster: by the time we'd introduced ourselves and managed to differentiate between Clara, Carla and Kyla and handed out the bingo cards, it was the end of the lesson, and we had to collect them all back up again. Second lesson, with the smallest kids, went slightly better: we managed to actually play the bingo game. However, we read the numbers out in Thai because the kids' English wasn't so hot, and even then, they tended to not actually cross them out on their bingo cards when they came up. So, we resorted to peeking over their shoulders, finding out the ones they needed to get a line, and rigging the game. Classy.

Our final bingo lesson was the most successful - we read the numbers out in English and most of the kids actually crossed them off their sheets when we did. However, they went from being extremely shy and unwilling to participate to shouting BINGO BINGO BINGO so loudly we struggled to make ourselves heard. For the older kids, we dispensed with the bingo and went for telling the time instead - I think we managed to eventually get across the concept of "quarter past", although we didn't quite manage "quarter to". After the first three lessons, we stopped for lunch which was delicious fried rice that unfortunately came in orphan-sized portions, accompanied by monsoon rain and the obligatory photos of the falang teachers in front of the blackboard. By fourth lesson I was too tired to do much but gently point the kids in the direction of the right numbers, trying my best to "elicit knowledge from the learners" rather than telling them the answers.

All in all though, it was a really lovely day with some incredibly cute kids. I'm kind of getting the hang of this teaching thing, just about, and making it up as I go along. The kids apparently loved the flashcards - they were for a class I wasn't teaching - and so we decided to donate them, meaning a thai childrens' home is now decorated with pictures of a gecko, a native american, a hamburger, an elephant, ronald mcdonald and a moose (In case you couldn't guess, that's an America/Thailand theme). So, in conclusion, after an exhausting day, I would summarise what I've learned so far as "flashcards good, bingo bad".