Teacher Stephen and Teacher Kristine

Ready to rumble

So the day had finally arrived, we had our first teaching experience with real students and an assessor who would be sitting in the corner grading our performance and making sure we followed the structure. 

Needless to say we were both bricking it. So our school week finished at 4pm on Thursday and the class was timed in for 5pm.

We had been given an hour to prepare our class room and ourselves. So we got "suited and booted" and began preparing the board. 

The class started off with us telling a story of a police man and a driver. We played both parts the policeman and the driver. The policeman stopping the driver for driving to fast (doing our best motorbike impressions ☺)  and asking him questions from an ID card such as “What is your first name?” and answering “My first name is___.” and so on...

We tried to get them to use proper sentences structure and also work on pronunciation, but also trying to make them laugh in the process which they happily obliged, as Thais love nothing more than joking and smiling.
For this lesson we had to teach 4 students ranging in age. The premise is to write 4 sentences using present tense, asking the students questions about what’s on an ID card.




What is your _________?
My ________ is ______.
Is your ______ ________?
Yes, it is. / No, it isn’t.

Comparing answers from the Exercise

We would have to explain nationality as opposed to country, gender, height, weight etc. Which when I asked, "What is your weight?" they would answer fat or skinny ☺. Having to explain it, was where it got interesting and fun.

Roleplay

We both walked out after an hour with huge smiles on our faces.It is an amazing feeling, having kids come into your class room with next to no English and before the end of the class they are able to answer all the questions even when we had removed all the information on the board and they also were able to complete some exercises and test sheets. We both got a 9/10 from our evaluators, and they said it was close to perfect for a first try and that we would only get better with time.

The relief of having the first teaching experience under our belts has given us a lot more confidence and we are looking forward to next Thursdays class. This time we will be doing a restaurant lesson, and the aim is to teach them the verbs: would, can and may, using similar structure.

We got home that night, still on a high and celebrated with a well deserved drink ☺ It was then we had fully realized that we had made the right decision to quit our jobs and head off to Thailand to start this new experience in the "land of smiles".

Absinthe cocktail