The Little Things

On the way back from Chiang Mai one day, the driver was careening around the turns on the mountain road as usual when unexpectedly, he stopped the van. We all craned our necks to see what he was doing. A turtle was trying to cross the street. It had just made it across our lane and would have continued into the path of oncoming traffic. But the driver picked it up, saying "Bpai nai?" (like "Where do you think you're going?"), and set it a couple feet in the bushes along the side of the road.


At the beginning of the semester, my co-teacher asked all the students to write a profile about themselves: name, nickname, birthday, address, personality traits, future occupation and idol. He told me many of the students don't know what they want to do in the future. No one motivates them to think about it; they assume they'll grow up doing what their parents did. My co-teacher said he wants to push them to realize what they really want to do - whether it's the same as their parents' way of life or something different. He asked them to list an "idol" for the same reason, so they have a role model - a teacher, family member, or celebrity. The students presented their profiles out loud in front of the class. One of the matayom 3 (= 9th grade) students said she wanted to be a teacher. As she read her idol, she gave me a quick look and said "Kruu Debi." :)


Last year, I barely ever talked to the fourth grade teacher besides to greet him with a brief hello when I saw him. When I spoke to him in English, he'd laugh nervously, "Ha.. ha.. I have no idea what you're saying... ha.." He always seems curious about what I'm doing in the teachers' room though. A couple weeks ago he commented about how I write and read a lot. I want to get my students to write more too, he said. How do I do that? I gave him some ideas and he started sharing them with other teachers. The other day, I found an article "An Imaginative Approach to Teaching Writing" and showed it to him. It was all in English, but he photocopied the pages and took them home with him. It's going to take me ten years to translate this, he said. Today he told me he translated the first two activities! Step by step...