Nicole

Today Chelsea, Rick and I started our third day at Baan Mae Khu School. This school is located in the outskirts of the city of Chiang Mai and usually takes us about half an hour by truck to get there. There are two kindergarten classes and one class for each of the grades one through nine. Although there are 17 teachers in the school, the majority of the time we have found that the students are left by themselves for hours at a time because the teachers have other jobs in the school. Some of the teachers are on committees and are in meetings for half the day. Others serve as the janitors and have to clean up the school. The students are expected to do their work independently, even when there is no teacher present. Most of the times this is the case. We have walked into numerous classrooms to find students diligently working. But, we have also found 40-50 first-graders left to be on their own from noon on, fighting and running around the classroom without teacher supervision.

When we arrived today at Mae Khu, we were told to teach English to the seventh-graders for the morning. We started off by drawing a diagram of a person and labeling all the parts needed to play the Hokey Pokey. We proceeded to teach these parts in English to our 29 seventh-graders. After attempting to master the words and motions to the song, we took them out into the field and sang the Hokey Pokey. The students thought that this was hilarious and had a great time. After singing the Hokey Pokey, we came up with the idea to have students write their names in English and then for each letter of their name, they had to come up with a word in English and draw a picture to accompany this word. The artistic abilities of the Thai students blew all three of us away. The neatness in the work of both the boys and girls were so detailed and advanced compared to work we have seen in the United States. When we taped the students' completed work to the walls of the classroom, the students were just in awe. I do not believe that any of their work had ever been displayed for all to see before. They loved staring and admiring each others' work.

At lunch our supervisor set out a table right outside our classroom and had tea, coffee, crackers, cookies and tangerines waiting for us. She told us that it was our coffee break. Then students brought us our food to our table. We all felt like we were being treated like royalty. We had rice, Chinese cabbage, mushrooms, shrimp and egg for lunch. We were served right outside of our classroom! Our supervisor didn't want us to eat with the students and wanted us to just relax. What a day!

It never ceases to amaze me each day that we are at our school the hardworking ethics of the Thai students. They work on their own when there is no teacher present, yet they have such a deep respect for the teachers that I have not seen in students from the United States. I wish that students from the United States would understand what little these Thai students have, yet how grateful they are for their education.

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