So I'm Not Crazy

Who would have thought our savior would have been a grey-haired Canadian woman named Martha? Petite in frame, she packs a lot of bite and helped us foreign teachers snap back to reality at Satit Bagna. A friend of Dr. Aree (our school director), Martha came in to school all of last week to make some observations and give some advice on ways to improve our teaching. Little did Aree and Absorn know that Martha would actually be giving them the advice...not us.

We realized after her visit that we have all been sort of numbed to the goings on at this school and have just sort of bit the bullet and called it ordinary. Martha's presence helped us realize that our initial impressions of this place were in fact correct and that the way the school is run isn't exactly normal. Coming from a background education herself, Martha was actually horrified when she walked into some of the classrooms she visited: kids on their phones or listening to music on speakers (not even headphones) while teachers were teaching, kids showing up 30 minutes late to a 50 minute class or coming into a classroom that wasn't theirs and talking to their friends mid-lesson. She witnessed the chaos that is my P5 classroom and by the end of the week she was laying some serious smackdown on the kids. Her only real advice to us was that 'The problems in this school are so fundamental that there is nothing as teachers we can do. It needs to start with the administration and the discipline of these kids, so just keep your heads up and keep doing what you're doing.' A sigh of relief. It was really nice to have an outsider come in and see what goes on behind the gates and see that the kids have kind of taken over. It reminds me a lot of that cartoon 'Recess' where the kindergartners live behind the tall fence and wreak unknown amounts of havoc on school grounds.

Martha had some really great pointers on how to go more in depth in a lesson and was awesome to have in class to lend a disciplinary hand--she even yelled at kids for picking their noses which is totally acceptable in Thailand...I know-gross. I think the administration was a little taken aback by her methods, but it was really nice to see someone who actually seemed to care that chaos is a daily element of this school and that, while Thai schools aren't the same as Western schools, there is no reason it should be like this. It was also nice to have someone to voice our opinions to the uppers in the school who usually smile and nod when we bring something up and somehow manage to forget to help us with what we've asked. On the bright side, it's nice to know that I will probably be able to handle any sort of boss/manager/work environment I ever encounter after surviving a year of this! Even brighter, I'm not crazy!