Trat

3.11.2018 - 11.12.2018

The final part of our exchange semester was our teaching-internship in Trat.

I was excited to finally arrive even though we didn’t really know what we had to do. I was happy to finally get to the sea and into a more rural environment. 

Our first surprise was our host family, which nicely took us in and showed us around the area whenever they could.

Right after our arrival we drove straight to the school where we met the teachers and the principal. We got our timetable and I was a bit surprised that we were expected to teach right away that day. To be honest I didn’t expect to teach alone with Jacob, because we didn’t really feel prepared (and experienced) enough to do so at such a high rate. But they were so kind to cut down our schedule after they learned that it was too overwhelming for us. 

In retrospect I think we could have managed all of the classes with a lot of planning and a bit of help, but it was just to sudden and so far, we only had the experience from one lesson in Austria and the German course in Bangkok. Jacobs Mother gave us a few really good tips and my grandmother (who was also a teacher and principal in elementary school) said that this is the way I can learn the most. After the first week (which was a bit chaotic) we had a few ideas up our sleeves and started to finally have fun while teaching. 

The kids are really awesome. Even though communication is not easy (with our mini basic Thai) we still understood each other for the most part. I was under the impression that the youngest students started to drift off pretty quickly, which is totally understandable due to such an unaccustomed exposure to a foreign language. We resorted back to just simple games and songs, but we taught them every day in the beginning and at one point we reached a limit to all our games and songs. But they were still one of my favourite classes to teach. We used a lot of pictures, drawings and pantomime to teach new vocabulary, and songs to improve the phonetics. 

I am really happy that we had the chance to challenge ourselves in that way, but I wish I have had more information before we got there. Nonetheless I think I’ve learned a lot and had an opportunity from which I can profit a lot in the future. I also hope that we reached some students and could inspire them to stay curious and interested in different languages and cultures. A few of them even translated for the rest of the class (which impressed me immensely, considering their age) and made it a lot easier for us to communicate. 

I hope we fulfilled the schools expectations, even though we’ve not been the trained teachers they might have expected. We still gave our best and had a lot of fun doing so.