Calm Down!

A Scouser phoned me the other day asking if I was looking for work, he had 12 days at a local Thai school.  I accepted and had a meeting with a nice Thai girl who said, ‘the kids are quite naughty, will you be alright?’  I smiled.  For those who don’t know me I have been working as a music teacher in deathly inner-city London schools for 8 years.  I am used to kids who call me a ‘dickhead’, tell me to ‘shut up’, ‘watch myself’ or even nicer ‘fuck off’, I am fully acquainted with kids who refuse to do anything and generally trash lessons on a daily basis, breaking up huge fights over a pencil being dropped on the floor’, being called ‘gay’, ‘batty boy’, ‘chi-chi man’.  I’ve had various items fly in my general direction, from donuts to compasses.  I’ve seen a teacher have her arm broken by four students just because she asked them to put their dictionaries on the shelves.  I’ve seen initiatives for better behaviour come and go and teachers desperately trying to implement them with no success and then be asked by those who’ve climbed so high in the system that they don’t teach anymore ‘are your lessons worth behaving for?’ as they quietly sob in their classroom.  ‘Yes, i’ll be fine’, I said.

My alarm went off at 6am.  Me and early mornings have a worse relationship than Tibet and China, at first I thought I was paralysed but gradually things began to work except for my eyes which led to a nasty incident in the bathroom landing rather awkwardly on shampoo bottle.  Remembering my trousers… I got into a taxi, boarded the skytrain, jumped on the metro and went into the school.

The school

As I walked in my first reaction was the place looked like a prison and then I counted the desks, twenty desks each seating two equals ‘headache’.  The buzzer sounded and in ran the students, some sat down, some chatted at the back of the classroom, some came in fighting and others waited by the door but not one of them acknowledged my existence.  I sat on a desk at the front and waited for them to settle…they didn’t.  Then a small boy came to the front of the class with a register and said something in Thai.  The class went to their seats and all chanted, ‘morning teacher how are you?’  I wanted to say, ‘absolutely disgusted with you for coming into my room so loudly and rudely, go back outside and try again and we’ll keep doing it until you get it right’ but thought that might be a little advanced so I replied’ I’m fine thank you, please sit down’.

As soon as they sat down they all turned around and started chatting to each other, fighting, stealing each other’s pens, and going on their mobile phones.  Shocked is not the word…  I said, ‘please be quiet’… nothing… I tried again (but louder)… nothing.  Last try I whistled so loudly that even the soi dogs came running.  They were very shocked and sat still, ‘Thank you’.  I started the lesson with a name game which threw up a few interesting ones: Nice, Milk, Rain, Deer (who were sat next to each other), Nan, Bom and Pee.  I then introduced the topic of ‘Where you live’ and gave them their first activity.  Through most of the explanation the kids were chatting and I couldn’t be bothered at 8.15am to stop them.  One boy hit another so I sent him out of the class room with my ‘how very dare you face’, then I moved four boys away from each other who wouldn’t stop talking.  I asked another boy to move who was disturbing the whole class with what I think was a donkey impersonation.  He refused, so I asked again… four times.  I suddenly snapped in my London teacher mode picked up his bag and slammed it down on his ‘new’ table hoping he hadn’t decided to bring his pet puppy in and thundered ‘MOVE’.  He jumped to his feet and did it.  I carried on walking round the class congratulating the students on their crap drawings of their favourite room in their house.  The small boy decided to move to another desk so I went over and asked him to move again.  He folded his arms and smiled, so I picked up his desk, walked with it to the corridor and slammed it down making a huge noise and said, move here or sit in the corridor.  After that the lesson went really well and you couldn’t hear a thai noodle drop.
At the end of the lesson I let the kids out and the Thai teacher/helper who had sat at the back of the classroom looked at me with a sneer and said ‘I want you to do conversation with them not this’, picking up a worksheet as  though someone had used it to wipe their bum with.  Now I am a pretty good teacher who likes a challenge but conversation lessons with my new Thai ‘friends’ in classes of 40 is like assisted suicide.  I said, ‘ok that’s fine, i’d love to do that’.  So you take 35 students and I’ll select 5 of them and take them to another room.  Little Miss Attitude told me I had to do it with the whole class so I said it was impossible.  Then she said I also had to do listening with them so I said, ‘they don’t listen though and do you have a CD player, let alone a CD.  She said ‘No, you have to make it yourself’ and with that she walked out of the room. 

No more Mr. iteach because iCare

I went to the staffroom to slap her but couldn’t find her, so I’d calmed down by the time I met her again.  I went to ask what she would like me to have a conversation about to which she said ‘anything, it’s up to you’.  Then she said, ‘I don’t like you, you’re too rude and have broken the school rules’.  ‘Pardon’?  ‘Yes’, she replied ‘You chased students around the classroom’, whistled at them and asked a boy to leave the room’.  Now if she thought that was rude, she’d have a nervous breakdown if she saw my behaviour management skills in London.  I told her that she was rude and wrote a letter to the Principal explaining why I was leaving and gave her a copy which she threw onto the floor.  Then I smiled and made a sharp exit and won’t be returning to a local Thai school ever again.

Other than ‘that job’, I am having a blast here in BKK and settling in well. 

Thailand's got Talent

Friends are visiting me from afar (thank you Caine, Joe, Josephine and Phil), the job on Saturday and Sunday is cool and I have fantastic mates here.  The only thing that annoys me is waiting for the skytrain and hearing excerpts from Susan Boyles debut album blasting out across the platform – so if you hear I have fallen onto the tracks, you know why!

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