Baan Ajarn

Teaching English in Thailand is a uniquely rewarding way for native English speakers to make a living in Thailand. Here are five tips to help you enjoy your job even more and gain respect from your Thai peers and your students:

Understand Thai Culture

This is not just a tip from me, but a requirement by the Teacher’s Council of Thailand for anybody who wants to teach in a Thai school. Thai culture is quite different from Western culture. Knowing a thing or two about Thai culture will not only help you build rapport with your students and Thai colleagues, it will also help you minimize the risk of putting your foot in your mouth. Get informed about the monarchy, religion, customs, and general beliefs. There is a lot of information available online and the mandatory 20-hour Culture course will ensure that you have a basic understanding of Thai culture. My previous post “The Culture of Thailand” may serve as a starting point.

Plan Your Lessons Well

This one is especially important for people without much experience teaching in Thailand yet.  It is recommended to print out a lesson plan, including a board layout for your planned topic, even if you are a seasoned teacher. Your Thai colleagues highly appreciate it because you appear well prepared and they can learn from your lessons at a different level. You also will make it easy for any teacher who may need to substitute for you, since they know exactly what you intended to teach your students. Your lesson plan doesn’t have to be a literary work; a few simple bullet points outlining the topic and aim of your lesson, the new vocabulary taught, and the exercises and games used to reinforce the material will do the trick.

Dress Appropriately

In Thailand, people care a lot about looks and this is especially important for a teacher.  Teachers are held in very high respect and not dressing appropriately will have a negative impact on that perception. I have seen teachers coming to work with old, torn pants, which were held together at the seams with safety pins. No kidding! I have seen female teachers entering a classroom in pink plastic flip-flops as if they were on a vacation. They didn’t look professional and guess what? They had more trouble managing the classroom as their peers who were dressed appropriately.

Have a look at my previous post “Dress Code for Teachers in Thailand“, which describes what is considered appropriate clothing for English teachers in Thailand.

Do Not Speak Thai in the Classroom

Some teachers keep insisting that they need to speak Thai in the classroom to explain some concepts as it would take too long trying to do it without the use of Thai. I respectfully disagree for several reasons:

• Students need to use different muscles in the brain to understand something without translation.
• If you are in the need of explaining something and can’t do it with pictures, drawings, and realia, you most likely are teaching something too complex and above the students’ comprehension level.
• Unless you’re speaking Thai perfectly, you will most likely make a fool of yourself with wrong pronunciation and perhaps even wrong usage of some words. Students will at the least laugh at you (even if just silently) and at worst will be confused about what exactly you are trying to explain to them.

If you struggle with the idea of not using any Thai in the classroom, imagine how you would teach a room full of mixed nationalities. There is no way you could speak all of the languages present and would have to find a way to convey the meaning of words without translation. It may require a bit more planning to prepare flash cards with images and drawings or to find real objects to bring to the classroom, but will be worth the effort. The end result will be a more interesting and entertaining lesson, which will lead to a higher retention of your taught material..

Make it FUN!

This one is a no-brainer. You will capture and keep the attention of your students when you make your lessons fun. It seems very easy to entertain students in a typical Thai classroom. They love the slapstick variety of humor and a few funny gestures and facial expressions will get you a long way. If you use flash cards, put one of them upside down in the stack. To you and me, this may not be all that funny, but watch the reaction of your students when you get to that flash cards. They will laugh, point, and shout at you, prompting you to take a look at your card. It’s all good though, because at that moment, you have the attention of your students and as a result, they usually learn the word on that flash card instantly.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about classroom activities in the weeks leading up to Christmas.  Today I had the pleasure of playing Santa Claus at one of my favorite schools in Samut Prakan: Bangpleeratbamrung School.

I sponsored a contest with attractive prizes (1,000 baht for the winner, 500 baht as a second, and 250 baht as a third prize) to find the most beautiful Christmas card. We scheduled the award ceremony for today during the morning assembly. Some of the students prepared songs and danced to popular Christmas tunes. Students, teachers, and the principal of the school enjoyed watching the performances and receiving gifts and candy.

Watch the short video to see how we celebrated Christmas early at BP-School:

For years an email has been circulating about the Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational which includes a very clever list of words made by changing common words.  It’s a hoax, because The Washington Post doesn’t really have such an invitational. Nevertheless, it’s a funny list and I enjoy it every time I see it. It has even inspired the website WashingtonPostsMensaInvitational.com which is collecting and publishing new submissions.

Since I have just received this e-mail for the n-th time today, I thought I put it up here as an inspiration for English teachers. It does make a fun presentation for your truly advanced English students. Depending on the age of your students, you may want to omit some of the entries. Then, have your students come up with their own list of modified words and their meaning. Laughter in your classroom will be guaranteed!

Here is the full e-mail:

The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are the winners:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
2. Ignoranus : A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.
3. Intaxicaton : Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
4. Reintarnation : Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
6. Foreploy : Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid..
7. Giraffiti : Vandalism spray-painted very, very high
8. Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.
9. Inoculatte : To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
10. Osteopornosis : A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
11. Karmageddon : It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.
12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
13. Glibido : All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a  spider web.
16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
17. Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

And the winners are:

1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.
6. Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.
7. Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent, n. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men

December is a month with relatively few classroom activities. There are a holidays to be observed, most notably the King’s birthday on December 5, Constitution day on December 10, and New Year’s eve on December 31. December is also the month in which many schools hold scout camps and their annual Sport Days.

Despite the name, Sport Days in Thailand are not really all about sport. Sure, there are competitions throughout the event and many prizes to be won. The sport disciplines typically include running, football, badminton, takraw, basketball, table tennis, and sometimes even ballroom dancing. The focus, however, seems more on cheering and presenting. There are competitions for cheer leaders, stand cheering, and group cheering. Students also compete for the prize of the best painted cheering stand and there are several parades, each of them with prizes to be won for the best performance. Sport Days in Thailand are lots of fun. Students, teachers, and visitors enjoy the sounds and sights to the fullest and for foreign teachers they are a welcome change from the daily classroom routines.

As a foreign teacher, you will also be asked to participate actively. In the days and weeks leading up to the event, you may be approached to help coaching students in some disciplines. Even if not, take a proactive approach and volunteer to help out in any way you can. Offer to coach the football or basketball teams. It is not only a great way for the students to learn some additional English, it is also a great way for you to show that you are part of the team. During the event, pick a team and join their cheering section. Your students will love you for it!

Some Sport Days even have events for teachers: football matches between the staff and a team of former students are often one of the most watched and cheered activities of the day. Playing on the teacher’s team will not only make your Thai peers happy, it may be a great source of laughter; especially if you play football as badly as I do. Give it a try at your school’s next Sport Day and you may find out just how much out of shape you might be.

To see photos of the Sport Day 2010 at Bangpleeratbamrung School in Samut Prakan, check out the BP School Sport Day 2010 photo gallery.

Learning a language quickly and successfully depends largely on a student’s motivation. If your students have a compelling reason to learn English, they will make rapid progress. They will study not only in your classroom, and do their homework, but they will also seek out ways to learn English outside of your set curriculum.

But how do you motivate your students?  Easy.  Give them a compelling reason why English is useful to them now.  Telling them they’d be able to “get better jobs sometimes in the future” just won’t do the trick. Students are typically not motivated by something way out in the future. They want to get the rewards now.

So how can English be useful to your students now? Easy again. Watch where they are headed after school. Many of your students will undoubtedly march right to the next internet shop to spend some time online. Naturally, they are visiting sites in Thai Language while browsing the web. But that’s only scratching the surface of all the internet fun out there, because the language of the internet is English; at least at this point in time. Chinese has been catching up rapidly, but nevertheless, English will continue to be the dominant language for the hottest and coolest sites.

Again, don’t even try to motivate your students with better job opportunities at some point in the future. Show them where and how English skills can be used right here and now. Show them how much more fun the internet can be when they access and understand sites that may only be available in English. Sites like BigFish Games, GameHouse, and Pogo.

To get started, help them, for example, to create their Facebook profile in English. Even though Facebook is available in the Thai Language, this activity makes an interesting classroom lesson. Download this Facebook Profile Sheet and use it in class to help your students getting started with Facebook in English. If you have an advanced class and want to make it extra interesting, try the Facebook Pirate Profile Sheet.  To switch Facebook’s language to the Pirate version, scroll down all the way to the bottom where you see your current language displayed as a link. Click on it and then click on “English” and select “English (Pirate)”