Dear Family and Friends,

Please accept my apologies as it has been days since I’ve posted to this blog. I’m finding that learning + teaching greatly interferes with my ability to write what I’d prefer, although the thoughts running through my brain are pretty much constant. It seems to take me time and energy to coalesce my wayward thoughts into a mildly entertaining blog entry - and I’m now low on both qualities.

During this week, I have reverted to my college student mien: I live in a place that resembles a dormitory, I walk to classes carrying a backpack with notes and text books, I’m always planning in terms of studying + assignments, and I’m stuffing my brain with academic theory and practice. When in the role of student, I’ve re-found myself to be one of the first to finish in-class independent assignments, although by no means would I consider myself top of the class capability or intelligence-wise. Happily, a late addition to my student mien has been increased comfort with my oft-times jolly personality and the resulting entertaining moments. A lovely example of the entertainment value that I can provide for my classmates comes from the journey to school on Friday morning when I was conversing with one classmate and not devoting enough attention to the sidewalk of mixed dry & wet concrete, particle board and holes. With my attention elsewhere, I accidentally dipped one of my sandals into wet concrete that a woman was smoothing into a big hole. Slightly dismayed, I asked another worker to wipe my sandal off with a brush and water. Later, as I later sat at a desk flexing my feet and swinging my legs (which I do because my feet do not comfortably reach the floor), the concrete dried and formed a significant dust pile under my chair – not to mention the little dust piles from me walking around the classroom. The piles were bad enough that I had to sweep up after myself! That afternoon, the classmate who had originally distracted me (can I blame him, please???) told me that I provided him with quite a bit of entertainment during his teaching practice observation as he was able to watch the dust get dispersed throughout the classroom by various students activities. Nice, eh?

The arrival of the weekend was sweet for us CELTA trainees. For my part, I had taught Monday through Thursday and was pretty worn down by my easy day on Friday when I only needed to take attendance while another teacher was setting up and interview a student for a written assignment due Monday. Keep in mind that before last Monday, my only experience in classroom-like situation was speaking to a room full of volunteer attorneys and although those seminars were nerve-wracking, they never put me off meals or made me wonder how I would ever do it. Throughout my entire life, I have been told that teaching is hard work. I understood this. I believed this. However, after subjecting my poor students to my rookie efforts for four days in a row, I truly needed a day off from wracking my brain for a lesson plan, really any plan, and the accompanying flurry of printing, the printers not working, running out of time before lecture starts, copying, the copier jamming, lunch-time running short, and nervously counting the minutes until I need to smile, engage, elicit from and teach our students. For me teaching is akin to stage performance: there are carefully thought out lines to say, props really help, and audience interest is key. Although the feature that makes teaching exceed the fun of high school drama is that I get to play myself in front of a class. Good stuff.

The CELTA course is teaching me just enough to realize how much I’ll need to learn (or that I’ll never learn) about being a good teacher. A funny thing about this week of learning about teaching is that it has inspired momentary school flashbacks as mentally, I’ve re-visited Woodinville High in my first days of learning Spanish vocab, I remembered my beloved 2nd and 3rd grade teacher, I recalled how much I learned from a strict English teacher in Junior High and felt that I had become my UW Italian teacher when I found myself standing in front of the classroom using large Italian-style gestures. I also keep stumbling across my UW Woman Studies sensitivities, most of which are currently related Peggy Orienstien’s theories about how men are conditioned to be loud and girls are conditioned to be quiet. This makes me keep reminding myself and my fellow teachers to not just call on the men (who mostly comprise our confident and seemingly capable students). Even engaging students in casual conversation reminds me of the many teachers who were forced to dig deep into their understanding of the world and the English language in order to explain a concept to me. All this to say that this teaching thing isn’t as easy as the good ones make it look – and that I hope one day to be a good teacher myself.

Anyway, the weekend is here and for the first time since my arrival in Bangkok, the weather has been picture-perfect clear & sunny but my written assignment, coming to grips with terminology, and a lesson plan for Monday are most pressing. Well, not pressing enough that I haven’t taken the time for two inevitable naps. And I did decide that seeing a city site was a must in order to “relax and prepare for next week” so early this morning a friend and I journeyed to the Chatuchak Weekend Market. In her Bangkok Travelgirl article, Janice McDonald says that “[t]his market is not for the faint of heart. Located near the Northern Bus Terminal, this maze of more than 9,000 individual booths offers everything imaginable. While it is popular with the tourists, it is very much a local market. Goods are divided into sections by type with furniture here, pets there, along with clothing, jewelry, hardware and food.” A friend and I spent three hours there and I shall offer a more detailed description… later.

But what I will reiterate to you now is that the shopping in Bangkok is truly amazing – I’d bet that it rivals Hong Kong or New York or Singapore – and that shopping seems to practically be the national competitive sport. In fact, I live down the street from the National Sports Stadium complex which is a good deal smaller and shabbier than the seven-story mall that is right next door to it. When we trainees were debriefing and discussing lesson plans for next week, one of my peers announced “oh, what hard luck. I’ve got to teach about skiing to a bunch of South East Asians. The proposed conversational student engagement session about how many of our students have gone skiing will go very fast.” We, his audience laughed, and suggested that he change the lesson to another competitive sport… and because we are here in Bangkok, shopping was the most obvious answer.

Gentle readers, please bear with me if these weeks of school turn out similar to this past week in that I cannot get to coalescing my thoughts. You may plan on me posting something during the weekends and I’m beginning to form ideas about what I’ll do next: I could visit a friend’s family in India, visit Angor Wat with another friend, or do the Thailand thing independently. We’ll see. And after talking to random people in the “W” Café as well as my peers, I suspect that I’ll be looking for jobs in Korea, Singapore, Japan, and Taiwan but now I’ve also briefly contemplated Eastern Europe or Turkey. The world is a stage and I’m merely a player upon it, yes?

I am doing well but please don’t let this deceive you all into thinking that I do not miss you. With much love,

Laura