Seven weeks of teaching in Ayutthaya: a round-up

Our intern Matt reflects on his two months’ teaching English at Wat Jaojednai school in peaceful Ayutthaya, Thailand.

In my seven weeks of teaching at Wat Jaojednai I learned so much. The thing I struggled with the most was judging the right lesson content and tone for the different grades with their different ages and ability levels. This was compounded by the fact that almost all the lesson topics were the same across all four grades, meaning it was all too easy to just fall into doing the exact same lesson for one grade as another. Wherever I could, I’d try to make the content or tasks slightly easier or harder depending on whether the next grade to have the same lesson topic was lower or higher.

Kindergarten presented its own set of challenges. There was no pre-set list of topics for this class, just whatever the teachers told us they were doing that day which was always either colours, animals, numbers or fruits and vegetables. This meant that while I was singing a song with them to start the lesson, I’d be racking my brains on what to do differently for teaching them colours for the third day in a row, which happened quite often. I frequently fell back on variations of duck-duck-goose, hiding coloured balls or numbers or whatever we were studying around the room for them to find, making competitive games where the students were in teams and had to race to say, the number four which was laid out on the floor with the others. I tried to keep them as active and the tasks as physical as possible, as whenever they were sat in a circle waiting for their turn to call out the name of a vegetable for example, you would quickly see their attention wane and the energy dissipate.

A lot of fun could be had in the role as teacher. When asking for a volunteer to try reading some target language and nobody raises a hand, you tell them you are going to pick somebody and you immediately see some of the students try to hide behind the person sitting in front! I used to do that in school and being on the other side of it is bizarre but exhilarating! Sometimes, so that I didn’t have to just keep picking the next person to speak, I’d let the last person to speak pick which of their classmates had to go next. This was always fun because the reactions showed you the relationships between students in the classroom, which I could use to my advantage later.

The students’ behaviour at my school was excellent, they were keen to learn and attentive. The level of English, across all grades, was very good I thought. When I first got assigned to teach grades six through nine, I thought I’d gotten the raw deal, as I had been expecting to teach younger learners than that and had been preparing for it mentally.

Soon though, I was glad that I was teaching the older students, as I didn’t have to cater for their age as much with games as my partner did with the younger students. Not everything went to plan, of course. Sometimes I would start an activity I had planned only to quickly realise by the uptake of it that it was a little too hard for them, or sometimes it appeared too easy. Like I said, sometimes getting the right balance was hard. Frustratingly, it took until the last week at the school for me to feel like I had made real progress on this but by then my time at the school was basically up.

I was fortunate to have been able to plan my lessons ahead of time in the way I was; not all the interns were given that luxury at their schools, instead turning up for each lesson and only then being told what they should teach, but this was the exception rather than the rule. The attitude of the teachers and students at the school made it a fantastic place to work, and the concerns I’d had about teaching in the run up to the internship were quickly abated.

On my final day at the school, I said an emotional goodbye and thank you to an assembly of all the students I had taught during my time there. They had given me the greatest teaching experience I could have asked for.