The first week was everything: exhilarating, terrifying, irritating, rewarding, and (literally) nauseating. I teach nineteen and a half hours a week. While I thought that was completely normal, even a bit easy (given that most full time American jobs in the professional world run anywhere form forty to eighty hours in a week), I quickly realized that nineteen and a half hours of teaching really means nineteen and half hours of performing stand-up comedy routines. And that’s exhausting.
In many ways I think I came to immortalize teaching much as I used to immortalize acting (which I find rather hilarious, since I’m starting to see so many similarities between the two jobs). I convinced myself over the last year that teaching was one of the most noble professions a person could pursue and that therefore, I should do it. I convinced myself of this so that I would feel better about moving to a corner of this globe I barely knew existed. Of course, I still do (and always will) believe that teaching is a very noble profession. I probably wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for my teachers. I mean that. But being noble doesn’t necessarily mean that you aren’t plagued with doubt, fear, irritation, and those pesky little calls of nature that you just can’t answer because you’re already late to your next class and it’s twenty minutes away on the second floor of a building that doesn’t have stairs.
(Deep breath).
This past week, as I bulldozed my way through seas of giggly students, I began to feel a change in my own skin. First of all, I knew that I was being watched. It’s impossible to avoid being seen, because students wear uniforms and teachers do not. If you’re not in uniform, you’re a teacher, and everybody knows it.
I never thought I would be cursing self expression!
I’ve always, always tried to blend in with the crowd, to avoid feeling put on the spot and to be able to watch life unfold from the safety of the wallpaper. But now I feel like I’m suddenly in the hot, bright spotlight–and I’ve only been teaching for a week of my life.
My dream is to use this awkward position of authority to my advantage–not to self-aggrandize myself, but to catalyze the respect teachers are supposedly garnered into challenging my students further in the classroom. Ok…but how?
I’m torn halfway between wanting to throw myself full-heartedly into this profession and wanting to lace up my boots, grab a backpack and hit the road.
I’ll go ahead and say it: it is not easy working in a foreign country. Nothing makes sense to me. The bureaucracy of Thailand isn’t my bureaucracy, so instead of brushing it off as “typical,” I get more and more frustrated. Every day I get more blank stares from students who would rather be on their cell phones or shopping at the mall than sitting in my classroom listening to me explain non-countable nouns.
What the hell are non-countable nouns, anyway???
Maybe I would be less frustrated if I had indeed finished an English as a Second Language training course. That’s probably what any logical, foreword-thinking person would do. But part of me thinks that no matter how “prepared” you are for a job, nothing can prepare you for getting smacked in the face by the unpredictability of human beings. Whether they are above or below you in “rank” (which is very big here in Thailand), human beings are just as messy, confused, and wanting to be loved as you.
If only I could hug everyone instead of having to smile politely and say “kap kun ma ka” for God only knows what.
Another Adventure 