I’m super behind on blogging, but I had no Internet at my house and the Internet at the library was often overloaded with other volunteers in the same situation as me. Short update: I’ve officially been sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer and I am at my site. But I’m going to keep this chronological and get you lovely readers up to speed that way. Also check out the Thai Theater post, as I have added pictures.
As part of our Pre-Service Training we participated in and facilitated activities that in theory will simulate our job at site. One of these activities was hosting an English and Life Skills Camp for some of the students in Suphan Buri. The Teacher Collaboration and Community Service (TCCS) trainees held mini English lessons and the Youth in Development (YinD) trainees did the life skills half. Our theme for the camp was ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations), which is kind of like the EU and in 2015 the educational standards will go into effect in Thailand.
We divided into 10 different groups, which was convenient because there are 10 countries in ASEAN. The mini lessons tried to focus the content on the country of the group; for example, I was in the Vietnam group, so we taught the vocabulary “lotus,” “boat,” “fisherman” and “river” and the sentence structure of The (blank) is in the (blank). The life skills groups, from what I could tell, touched on the countries but did not focus on them nearly as much.
So this is how this deal went down: we had two and a half days to plan and create materials and then on the designated day roughly 140 fourth graders showed up at the school. We divided them into groups that separated them from their friends, tried to play some energizing games which they were really not into (at least my group was not) and then started on with 25 minute rotations. By the end of the day, I was exhausted and super goofy.
Overall, I was not a fan of the English camp as something to do as a part of my service. I really feel that is is extremely unsustainable and that the kids don’t learn much from it at all. (I’m withholding judgment of the life skills part since the TCCS cohort will have their own version later.) Also, since it seems like most English camps happen with the help of other PCVs, it makes it even more unsustainable in that after we leave the teachers have not done it themselves and probably aren’t comfortable doing it. A lot of the English groups used the same sentence structure, so in the workbooks the kids had they copied each others’ during lunch. The success I see in this is the improved attitude towards learning English, but I feel like the return in that is not proportionate to the amount of work that goes into putting something like this on. I think that result can be achieved in more efficient ways.
One of the things that I hope the most for of my service is sustainability. I want to see the effects of me being here last beyond my presence. I don’t think that goal of mine was necessarily achieved with the students I worked with today, unless you count them saying “Vietnam” in ridiculous ways as sustainable. Don’t get me wrong, their giggles and smiles were a great reward for a hard day’s work, but when I look back on two years, I will be OK if all I have are smiles and giggles but I will be excited to see a more lasting change.