Breaking Out of School

My only class today were my G.10s in the morning. They were so late moving from the classroom downstairs to the one I was in upstairs and some didn’t pay attention for parts of the lesson. I ended up just doing the waiting for them to stop talking before I talk because I don’t want to shout thing. Some of the girls noticed and got the rest of the class to shush for me. So at least some wanted to learn today. I got them to do a task where they had to tell me the directions from one part of the map (that I had drawn on the board) to another building on the opposite side of the map. They were in groups of roughly six, meaning there were only eight groups, so I should have been able to get through them all. But I’m glad I started with testing the groups of boys as I only managed to do five groups before the lesson ended. So the ten minutes they wasted would have been extremely useful. It was great getting the boys to answer take part in the speaking activity. Although I had to really push them to the repeat phrases such ‘go straight over the roundabout’ rather than ‘straight over’, I eventually got them to do it and feel like they’re getting somewhere.

That afternoon Hannah and I had English Club. We didn’t need to plan as we could use the one from two weeks ago (when no-one turned up). We only had two students, they were from Hannah’s G.8 class and called Bam and Foe, but we were happy just to have students. Hannah led the activities today, which made sense as she had done most of the planning. It was quite nice to step back and just help for once.

The first activity we did was Word Unscrambler. We wrote a word on the board, with the letter order mixed up and the first student to unscramble the letter correctly got a point. We then did Word Unscrambler with sentences too. So the sentence order was correct, but the letters of the words were not. Bam was really good at it, but Foe did manage to get a few points too.

We then did Sentence Unscramber on paper. So we had words written slips of paper and made a sentence when placed in the right order. Bam and Foe each had three sentences to reorganise each. They then had to read the sentences to us. They each won once, but both when they were with Hannah… I swear I just have a losing streak.

We then played Hangman with them. Apparently it looked like so much fun that we adopted two girls, Pom and another, from Chinese club. Thankfully Yang didn’t mind as she had finished. We then played a few more rounds of Hangman be it was time for the students to leave. Hopefully we’ll have a few more students for English Club next time.

Hannah and I then came back to the staffroom to find from Eilidh and Kate that we were allowed to leave an hour early. Aum had booked us a taxi to go to the bus terminal at 4.20 and we were allowed to leave to change (and shower quickly) before we headed to the bus terminal. It felt really weird walking down to the school gates while there were still students there. It was even weirder when three boys in cadet uniform saluted us as we walked through the school gates to wait for a taxi. It also gave me a bit of a fright, but it was a sweet gesture.

The taxi came at about 4.25 and we managed to book our bus tickets to see Aum in two weeks. We’re catching a bus on the Thursday night as it is a national holiday on the Friday (Mother’s Day) and arriving in Bangkok very early. Aum is then meeting us and we’re catching a bus to his town and spending the weekend with him. We’re all really excited about it. We’ve also sorted what we’re doing this weekend. It wasn’t possible to book the tickets to Buriram, but we’re going to catch the 7.30am bus on Saturday that will get us to Buriram before midday. Now we’ve just got to plan what we want to do there!

After booking we got a taxi, without Aum’s help, to Big C (the shop we went to on our first Sunday to buy pillows and an ironing board). Although this wasn’t such a big feet as they’re probably the words everyone knows – along with hello, goodbye and Central Plaza! We went to stock up on stationary. I only needed some pens, but Eilidh and Kate seemed to buy all the paper and school essentials in the shop; although I took just as long when we went to look at the clothing section. I found a pile of plain short-sleeved t-shirts that small marine animals embroidered over top left side. They were so adorable (and 10 baht cheaper than the plain t-shirts) that I found the need to go through all the white and grey t-shirts to find the size and animal I wanted. I went for a white t-shirt with a white embroidered whale, and a grey t-shirt with a white embroidered crab. I now have two conservative but cool t-shirts to wear. We also found Koala bears at the check-out. Needless to say they will be had when I enjoy Netflix tonight in my grey t-shirt with my little crab friend.