Teaching English Camp at Panason Wittaya School

Where is Surin?
Surin is a large province on the Mun River basin in the lower Northeast of Thailand; approximately 450 kilometes nother east of Bangkok.

What am I doing in Surin?
I am currently undergoing a volunteer project for the next 4 weeks, with Starfish ventures, to teach English amongst the multiple schools in the surrounding area. The first assignment for this week is to conduct an English language camp at Panason Wittaya School which is about 30 minutes east of Surin. The camp covers grades 7 to 12 and the various age groups are spread out amongst 4 days of English Camp. There are 4 other English teachers (3 from the UK, one from Australia) on the project and a total of 640 students that are enrolled in the camp. I know what you are thinking, most likely same thing that I did when I arrived; that is a lot of students in regard to teacher ratio! Today between 2 teachers (grades 9 and 10 split in half) we taught a total of 100 students our activities. The activities consisted of basic greetings and where you come from. We also went over numbers, colors, emotions, jobs (occupations) and body parts through various activities and games. The challenge comes when we not only had to put the entire program, timetables, props etc together but crowd management: how do you keep 100 children engaged (hopefully enthusiastically) to get them to learn interactively when they don't speak your language with only 2 teachers? The real challenge was realized when many of the students did not speak or understand basic English...I mean when I ask them what their name is and how old they are they can not tell me and not understand the question! This was not the case for every student but many were struggling with the basics. This we tackled with speaking very slowly and using body language, pictures and a whole lot of animated acting skills!! LEARNING BASIC COMMANDS IN THAI IS A NECESSITY: like "gnaip gnaip" which means be quiet or "Kru" which means teacher.

Of course we get some help from the Thai English teachers who translate some of what we say but in all honesty they are speaking remedial English themselves which we also struggle with.

Overall taking on the challenge to teach English was not as easy as I thought; it takes a lot of time and preparation before the lessons, how the day will run, props, practicing what we want to teach that is very time consuming. We spent 5 hours after school the first day just to plan what and how we wanted to teach the kids. Last night an additional 3 as we tackle a different age group tomorrow in order to tailor the lesson.

On a very positive note, after the second day the kids really loved us; they asked us for autographs, many giving hugs and of course genuine smiles and thanking us for being there. I left for home completely exhausted but happy that today I made a difference; I actually could see the progress and felt so important to these kids.