Listening Thai Kids ( not )

Nothing of note really happened today except that I got feedback on my observation from the head FUD. I think it lasted all of 5 minutes and that included time for a “career chat” on what I was going to do next year. Wow. The biggest, well I will be honest, bigger comment because there were only two, was that I hadn’t got the kids into teams to “involve” them more.

True enough, I don’t have the kids in teams. I have tried it before and then had to change them round because of discipline problems. Then when I changed the teams, they ended up with about half the original team. Which sort of goes against the whole team bonding, making it involved and keeping their interest theory when the team changes every couple of weeks.

I tried a couple of practice listening tests today on the 2s & 3s and really it was as expected. Some did ok and some were just not interested and didn’t try. Some of them are so bad at listening. They just don’t try, don’t want to try and even if they are half trying they cant do it because they are not used to doing it in normal class. Imagine saying “draw a line between the dog and the ball…the chair and the snake….the father and the sandwiches….” Some of them drew lines between the right objects, some between the correct things, some drew LIONS ! Some had lines going from random objects to other random objects, some connected everything.

Now imagine part of the exercise is to colour in various objects. Despite being told to bring coloured pencils to every class, I had one P3 class where out of 20 kids, 7 of them had the coloured pencils. AAARRRGGGHHHH. So a quick lecture of you cannot share, you cannot borrow, you have to write the colour next to the object later and we start the test. Can you guess, the first thing that happens? Yes, that’s right, the ones without the colours start to get up to borrow from the ones that have them. Double aarrgghhh!

The search for a job goes on for May and beyond. But as I previously wrote, the timing in some ways is wrong with many of the schools not yet looking for warm bodies. But there are schools advertising and I have sent a few applications away to see what happens.

Ideally I would like to get a full time corporate gig or in house trainer. A couple have appeared in the Bangkok Post which I have applied for, so it’s a case of wait and see now.