Thursdays' Terrors & Thai Shoelaces

One of the good things so far about this little blog thats read byt oohh maybe a least 1 prson a week is that I am managing to do it more or less straight after work which really lets me vent the old spleen and I type exactly what I feel rather than doing it the day after and refelcting and calming down.

Thusday is really not a good day for me, I have 3 P2s and only 1 P3 class. The trouble is in my worst class I have one very good kid, well behaved, he tries hard, he is enthusiastic and he gets lost in the chaos. I try my best and make sure I let him know I know he is trying but its difficult. He is always the first to finish his work and 90% of the time its correct. If this happens I try to give him a choice of what he can do next ( fort he next 10-15 minutes ) before the class ends. Normally he likes ot do some sort of puzzle which I am more than happy to give him but if he chooses some colouring sheet he can do that with my blessing. Now some of the others little brats will get more work.

As you can tell, I am more a reward for what you have done rather than a reward first then hope they do it person. This is both through nature and experience, I have found very few times that they do the work after they have accepted the reward. Even baiting the end of the work with the reward ie saying "if you finish we will do colouring in / show a video" etc doesnt work.

The classes today were horrible, kids not listening, doing what they want, ignoring me, horrible. A typical conversation goes like this

Teacher "where is your book?"
Student "no"
"where is your book?" he says shrugging his shoulders and raising his palms in where is it sort of gesture.
"no" looking at anywhere else rather than the teacher
"where is your book?" he says again pointing at someone elses book and shrugging his shoulders and raising his palms in where is it sort of way.
"no" talking to his friend next to him
"where is your book?" he says again pointing at someone elses book and shrugging his shoulders and raising his palms in where is it sort of way and trying to suggest places "Homeroom?".
"no"
"where is your book? At home"
"no"
at this point if not before I would dearly love to pick the little darling up by his round little ears and shake him until I was physically exhausted before belting him with some blunt object. Of course I dont do that. and the last resort comes into play. Thaiglish.
"book, yoo ti ni?
Sometimes I get some sort of response at this point, some sort of guttural "home"

Of course by this time I have wasted umpteen minutes and the rest of the class is getting restless. But I feel it is important to reinforce the class rules as in BRING ALL THE STUFF I TOLD YOU TO! and its written permanently on the whiteboard and they wrote it in their notebooks as well. Otherwise they will just take the Michael out of you every time they come to the class.

On that point, one of the kids was overheard saying he was going to "play English" not to learn English but he used the Thai word "play" With that attitude, how can we win and be even semi serious teachers.

Ok, onto the shoelaces. Why cant kids keep their shoelaces doen up? It seems that I always have at least one kid per lesson not doing their work because they are tying up their shoelaces again, they do it in the line up in the playground, outside the homeroom and outside our rooms. I mean for fecks sake. How come I never see them doing it in their break time? Umm, ok, I know why, its just another excuse to goof off in class.