I could never choose a favorite student, just like a mother could never choose her favorite child. Right. My mom told me I was her favorite and she doesn't care who knows it. It was in a dream I had last week but it's probably true. I have about 130 students total, and I do have it narrowed down to a top five, just based on silly mannerisms they have in class.
Fifth place award: Ok, so it's not just one student, but a group of them. Today I was so fed up with the boring curriculum so I came up with an activity where they get to map out notes on a big piece of poster paper as a group. I gave each of the groups a poster and a marker to go to town. As I should have expected, about half of the students were already armed with their own pouch of markers in every color imaginable. Thai students will never hesitate to make homework more colorful. So this award goes to them and their hello kitty pouches and markers. Honorable mention to the student who drew two zit-faced cartoon characters on the poster (the article topic was 'acne treatment').
Fourth place award: I have a freshman dentistry student in my sophomore/junior English class. He is more advanced than the rest by far. The older kids use him by saying their question to him in Thai and then he asks me in English. He translates my answer back in to Thai for them. It's a nice system we have going. Anyway, he is the only one who laughs at my jokes, and this catches me off-guard because every once in awhile I say stupid things just to amuse myself and assume no one will catch my sarcasm. In my afternoon class, the last class of the day, no one was responding and I'm basically talking to myself up there and as I'm writing on the board I half sing to myself, "I would kill for a nap right now..." and I hear, "me too" from behind me. Whoops.
Third place award: I like to make eye contact with as many students as possible when talking. I sometimes play a game to see how long I can hold someone's gaze and then move to the next person. I would think it would hold their attention because it seems like I'm talking to each individual with actual intention. Maybe it just freaks them out; either way I don't care. This female student smiles a big braces smile and nods furiously when I make eye contact with her. I will look away and she stops, I look back and nodding. She wants me to see that she's listening. I love it. I try and keep my eyes on her and the nodding keeps going in intervals, nodding, nodding, then it almost seems like she nods harder as if to say, "I get it! Stop staring at me!" It's sweet, really.
Second place award: A boy that sits in the back corner of the class everyday would come off as a student who couldn't care less to be there, but he does this odd thing where he sits on the edge of his seat and stares at me with big eyes and a big smile. I wonder if he's playing my game with the third place winner. I wonder if he's making fun of me or if he's genuinely interested in the lectures. I will not let it freak me out... (it does a little). If he's really interested, then he gets the award for most enthusiastic. If he's mocking me, then he gets the award for beating me at my own game. A winner, nonetheless.
First place award: I love this student for one reason, and he keeps enforcing this every class. Any and every time I explain the next activity or the next in-class assignment, he does the same thing. He gives a big groan from the gut and it turns into a sigh that rivals a Napoleon Dynamite while shaking his head, and sometimes for extra dramatic effect lets his head fall into his hands in despair. If I didn't know any better, I would think that a voice in his head told him the world was about to end. Now it's not that these activities and assignments are awful. I used to get annoyed by his reaction, but now I just see that he's doing this to let everyone in the class and myself know that he understands the words I am saying, while my words go over the heads of most others. This once-irritating-response is now a source of some sick sort of joy I get out of assigning work. I even catch myself giving instructions to the class and then looking over to him, anxious for his reaction. Love it.
There are too many things that I love about this computer store. The missing letter? The bundle of power lines? Or the array of technology (circa 1980) connected across the globe? Can't decide, but I bet the helpdesk people that came to fix my internet a couple of months ago work at this place. Without a doubt.
I just completed a Tai Chi class here in Chiang Mai, and according to my calculations, I'm now a ninja. It was a series of one-hour lessons, just about every day for two weeks. I learned the 24 form, and I plan on continuing to practice. I'm finding that all these different activities I've been getting into really seem to compliment each other: yoga, meditation, tai chi...
Possibly the one word I get my chops busted the most for because of my Minnesotan accent: Moat. The moat and Doi Suthep are the two things that have given me my geographical bearings in Chiang Mai since I arrived here. You can see Doi Suthep mountain from just about anywhere in the city, and it helps me know where West is. The moat circles, or squares rather, the old city. It has four walls, making a nice square mile of a city. There are five gates around the moat. The gates tend to be great meeting places, or good locations to use for taxi destinations. Each gate is in it's own distinct neighborhood, and usually has a market nearby. The moat itself is really quite beautiful. Especially at night. During the day, the water is pretty murky brown, but all the trees around make up for that. A note about the trees: someone has stapled little orchid plants to just about every tree surrounding the moat, and they all seem to be surviving just fine. It's always nice to be walking along and have orchids staring back at you at eye-level. Inside the moat are endless guest houses, temples, restaurants, bars, shops, etc. All jam packed with little soi's (alleys connected to a main road).
The moat is interesting because of the way traffic works around it. There is a road on the outer moat and a road on the inner moat; both of these roads are one way traffic. There are no stoplights. The outer moat traffic runs clockwise, and the inner moat runs counterclockwise. There are only a handful of places where you can bridge between the inner and outer moat, including the five gates. So depending where you are, you might have to drive around a corner of the moat away from your destination just to be able to turn around and go in your desired direction. I'd love to see it from a birds eye view, but you can probably imagine how traffic runs like a river. It seems to work quite nicely, except when you want to cross the street.
The moat is going to be a key reason why Songkran will be such a riot in April. Songkran is the water festival, celebrating the coming of the hot season. Basically it's a week-long water fight. People splash each other with buckets of water, people get splashed. Kids on the back of motorbikes spray waterguns at other traffic or pedestrians. Chiang Mai is the perfect place for this festival because of the moat. Other places you have to find a source of water, but here, people literally jump in to get their ammo. Can't wait to see that.
Last note of today, I walked by a restaurant this morning called.... Thaitanic. It even had a giant poster of the ship (pre-iceberg) out front. How brilliant.
They absolutely crack me up. The last couple of days the students had to do role-plays of their own TV show. They had to choose real characters (most students were either Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, or Brittany Spears) and perform a six-minute skit. I loved every second of it. I was completely surprised at how outspoken they became in these performances. Thai students are known to be incredibly shy.
Most groups incorporated some sort of song or dance into their skit. They had someone in the audience call a cell phone just so the hip hop ring tone could blast and they would lip sync and dance to the cell phone ring as part of their performance. Brilliant. I also accumulated lots of gifts yesterday once they were done with the props for their performances, including a bouquet of flowers, a tuna sandwich, and a small carton of warm milk. I felt utterly special.
I also took video of a few performances, just so you can see how difficult it can be to decipher some of the things they say, and also see how entertaining they are nonetheless. I will try to get those posted soon. In the meantime, enjoy the pictures on the link to the left. You might notice in some of the pictures, the students wear signs around their neck. Now some of these signs are for the performance, noting what character they are playing, but the other signs they actually wear all year-round. The freshman wear these signs to signify what major they are, as well as their dorm and first and last name, I believe. The last time I wore a sign around my neck for school was when I was about 5 years old and it had my pre-school teacher's name and bus number on it, and that was only for the first week of school. It's amazing that all of these freshmen comply with the signage. They even wear their signs out in public at night and on the weekends...something I will never understand.
Last weekend I was asked to come and help out with a project that one of the Thai Ajaans at CMU put together for young students from marginal schools around Chiang Mai. This was by far one of my favorite experiences as a teacher thus far. The project was a two-day seminar for English students learning the language through poetry and story-telling. It was such a fabulous idea and the students were incredibly enthusiastic. I was the only non-Thai native English speaker in the room. I was there to offer my input on grammar and pronunciation, help with activities, and just talk to the students. I loved talking to them and they loved talking to me. One girl wanted my help with something she was writing but she couldn't spit out her question because she was giggling so hard. A Thai teacher came up behind her and told me that she was very nervous to be talking to me and then told her, "Ask her nicely, 'Can you please help me?'" She did and just kept giggling. It was infectious, actually.
The first activity was interpreting a poem. First of all, I was amazed at the poem of choice. Keep in mind these are middle school students and the poem was called "Homage to my Hips." I think I was the only one who realized how funny this was. The last lines of the poem were "These hips are magic hips. I have known them to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top." So what do you think this means, children? I had to bite my lip so I wouldn't laugh. I then worked with a small group of girls on pronunciation and reading with emphasis and expression. It felt a little uncomfortable to tell these girls to really put gusto into the lines "these hips are big hips, they need space to move around in..." They loved it. All the small groups eventually read the poem for the rest of the class, and I admit, the group that I worked with sounded the most Minnesotan. They said "arrrre" and "top" like a Minnesotan would, while the other groups say "ah" and "tup." I was impressed and proud of my girls.
I felt a little strange being singled out when asked to correct grammar for the students' (and teachers') poetry in front of the group. I was sitting in the back of the room of about 50 people and the lecturer would stop several times to ask me, "this phrase is ok, no?" Well, for one thing, who am I to correct student's poetry? If a student wants to write a poem that says "dreams boil rainbows and freedom," then I say give the kid a beret and snap my fingers in applause.
