English Camp…
I must admit that when we were invited to our “voluntary” English Camp this past weekend, I was not excited to say the least. The only thing that crossed my mind was that I was going to have to spend 12 straight days with screaming Thai children and that sounded like the most unappealing thing ever! However, it turned out to be a complete blast in a strange sort of way.
Two weeks ago my fellow teachers and I were told that there was a voluntary English Camp being hosted by our school during the last weekend of May, but we had already made plans to go to Chiang Mai that weekend. We explained this to the Thai teachers and of course they ended up rearranging the entire camp for the following weekend just so we could attend. This should give you an idea of just how “voluntary” this camp actually was. It is almost close to impossible to say “no” to a Thai person when they want you to do something, so once we heard that the camp had been moved on our account, we knew good and well that it was not really voluntary. There were about 50 different schools involved in this camp, so once again there was no voluntary about it! Reluctantly we all agreed to go for a whopping 1000 baht each for about 16 hours of our weekend. Needless to say…we were not excited for it.
The 7 AM wake up call this Saturday came way sooner than I had wanted, but there was no sense in complaining because there was not a thing I could do to get out of it other than flee back to the States! The four of us set out on our daily 30 minute walk to school with no idea as to what to even expect from English Camp. Once we arrived we were asked to sign in and were then led into the music room where we sat and watched the 6th grade kiddies start to poor in. I teach grade 6 and so I was trying to figure out which of the kids were mine, but because I see about 1,000 students a week it was pretty close to impossible to pick out the kids that attended my school and which ones were coming from the other 50 some odd schools.
While we were sitting around waiting for the opening ceremony we had noticed a big sign hanging on the wall that said “English Resource and Instruction Center” equals ERIC. After a few moments we started to giggle as we had been told to go to Eric’s room to pick out stories for the camp several times during the proceeding week. We kept wondering who this Eric guy was and were curious to meet him. The joke was on us of course as there was nobody by the name of Eric! English Resource and Instruction Center…ha-ha…the Thai teachers really got a kick out of this one. Silly farang!!
Tip is one of the many Thai teachers that we teach with and she was the one to kick off the opening ceremony. She introduced herself and told us that she was beautiful, and then passed the microphone over to J to start off the “farang” teacher intros. All foreigners are referred to as “farang” here, so you will usually hear a bunch of Thai that you can’t understand with farang sprinkled in here and there, which alerts you that the Thai folk are talking about you! First it was J called to the stage, then Aoifa, then me and then Kelly and so one by one the crazy farangs stood up and proceeded to make complete fools of ourselves! The students were laughing and the Thai teachers were smiling, so the morning started off on a good foot.
We were told that we did not have to worry about preparing any activities for the weekend since we were of course just the guest teachers, but we all knew that this would more than likely not end up being the case. True to form we were told to come up with the icebreaker games about 15 minutes prior to start time. We scurried to think of some simple and yet engaging activities. First on the list was the ever so popular game of: Head, shoulders, knees and toes, which was quickly followed by a game known as 4 corners and don’t forget about the Hokie Pokie. These games were all a smash hit, so the farangs were holding their own so far in day one of English Camp!
About an hour and a half into the day we were told to split up into our separate rotations. J and Aoifa were on Rotation 1, which was going to how to introduce one’s self and talk about your family, hobbies and things of that nature. Fry and Kelly were on songs
and games, which is pretty self-explanatory and then there was Teacher G on story telling. We were all supposed to be working along side the Thai teachers in our groups. This was not the case for little old me. My Thai teachers ended up sitting in the back of the story telling room along with the Director of the school and watching me try to turn this 10-page story into an hour-long event.
Early in the week I had been sent to Eric’s room to pick out a story in English to read to the students during English Camp. It was explained that each Thai teacher in my rotation would be reading a story, so I went to pick out my book only to find that there were only about 5 books to choose from. Three of the five books were for first graders, one just looked really lame and so this left me with: Sunny’s Adventure as my only halfway decent option. I was not too worried about it though because I was assuming that I would only have to read for about 10 to 15 minutes as the most since there were four other teachers in my rotation that were all supposed to be reading a story as well. Silly me…should have known better.
I was told to read my story first and so up on stage I went. My story was about a monkey by the name of Sunny that was on vacation with his family visiting the Space Mission Control Center with their pet monkey. Sunny the monkey ended up having to go to Mars to fix the compass on the space shuttle. So let me just make sure that you understand that these kids can barely understand you when you ask them how old they are, what their names are and how many brothers and sisters they have. Space Mission Control Center is so far beyond their comprehension that for me to just sit there and read through this book would have been certain boredom and with zero help from the Thai teachers, I was starting to realize that my job for the day was not to simply read this book.
My job for the day was to act out a complete one-person play over and over again. We blasted off like rocket ships, we talked about what types of fruits and veggies various animals eat and we went over the different colors we saw in the pictures. I basically had to ask a question at the end of every sentence and then act out all the vocabulary in order to make sure the students were following this ridiculous story and me. All this while the school's Director was observing me in this little story room with no fan or air-con! Oh great….was all I could think at first, but then I really got into and the kids were getting into and the day melted away.
I was completely exhausted, but feeling happy because I felt like I actually taught the kids a thing or two by the end of the day. They were smiling and laughing and they all now know that they live on planet Earth!! Day one of camp was a great success for all of us, which made the thought of returning
for day 2 not nearly as dreadful as we had imagined it would be. We walked home, went to dinner, laughed deliriously for several hours and then passed out.
Day two was way more chill than day one, but still a bunch of fun. We played games, sang songs, ate lots of food, laughed and bonded with both the students and the Thai teachers. We ended the day with the typical certificate presentation and tons of pictures. Thai people love getting certificates, so you get a one for pretty much everything here. Then we were all bombarded by the students for our autographs, which was really cute and made for a nice ego boost!
Everyone is really amazing here and I am thankful to have been able to spend my weekend with
such a diverse group of wonderful people in such an amazing culture! English Camp totally rules!!!
