As I learned years ago, a day with kindergartners is never an average day. While almost always well-meaning, kids tend to be either sweet or terrible. There's no escaping the binary existence you've signed up for. Luckily, as I've got 3 different kindergarten classes every morning, there's a good chance that 2/3 of them will be adorable and I'll forget all about the little monsters.
Teaching English without any knowledge of Thai to rooms full of 25 monolingual 3-5 year olds certainly seemed daunting 3 months ago, but I've managed to figure out a sort of system. In a way, it's nice to not have a common language - the kids are forced to try to make sense of what I'm saying, and I've been learning a little Thai along the way.
Here's what I feel like I've managed to "solidly" teach them:
Greetings (Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night)
Days of the week and number of days in a week
How are you? (angry, sad, hungry, tired, scared, happy)
How's the weather? (cloudy, sunny, rainy, windy, snowy)
Shapes (Circle, square, triangle, rectangle)
What color is this? (blue, green, yellow, red, orange, pink, purple)
How many?
Counting 1-20
Where is the...? (door, chair, table, eraser, marker, pencil, window, teacher, student)
Letters A-R and how to do things like draw a line from M to a picture of a mouse
2 vocab words for each alphabet letter
Body parts (head, shoulders, knees, toes, eyes, ears, nose, mouth)
Action words (Sit down, stand up, come here, clap, count, color, write, circle, draw a line)
Quiet, loud, fast, slow, ready, finished, good, big, small
Boy, girl
Please, thank you, you're welcome
Attempted:
Meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner)
Various animals
More obscure action words (jump, turn around, run, walk)
What is your name? (As important as this is, it was impossible for them to understand this concept without me being able to speak Thai and without already knowing their names. More on this later)
"Solid" means that most of them know these words/concepts or, after a little prodding, can remember them again quite quickly. We practice them daily or I try to at least use them in my own speech to keep it in the kids' minds. "Attempted" means I sometimes dedicated large parts of my lessons to these things, but it's been too difficult to maintain practice. It's hard to go over 10 different animals every day - there's not enough time and it won't keep their attention. As a general rule, it's impossible to teach them things I can't easily bring into use every day. For instance, I can ask them how are you, how's the weather, what day is it, etc at the beginning of every class. I can make it a point to incorporate concepts like "where" and "how many" in my daily speech. Every day I practice pleasantries by having them say please and thank you when receiving their workbooks. But anything else is difficult to practice every day and therefore difficult to retain. It's useless to teach them vocab that can't be found in the classroom. It's impossible to teach them concepts that can't get them moving or touching things. The single hardest, unexpected difficulty in teaching ESL to kindergartners (other than having zero resources) has been their inability to understand the concept of questions (although this problem extends to the higher grades as well!). It's unbelievably difficult to get them to understand the difference between when I want them to repeat after me for practice and when I want them to answer a question and not repeat it. No matter of hand gestures will help me. I discovered this during the first and second lesson, when I decided to teach them what I naively thought would be the most useful and easy concepts: how are you, and what is your name. I could get them to repeat these phrases until they were blue in the face, but there was no chance of getting them to treat it like a question. Here's how this dialogue usually went.
Me: How are you?
Class: How are you?
Me: Me? I'm happy. How are you?
Class: Me? I'm happy. How are you?
Me: Are you...hungry?
Class: Are you hungry?
Me: Yes? You are hungry?
Class: Yes? You are hungry?
*I forgot to mention that I first taught this lesson with a little hand puppet. I repeated the conversation with the puppet and tried to have the kids converse with the puppet, but to no avail. Shrug. At least they loved the hand puppet.
After employing every possible hand gesture etc etc I decided to give up on them ever quite being able to answer this. The best I could do was to get them to remember the vocabulary, and as time went on I've found ways to sort of get around these problems. They've become better at understanding the concept of yes/no questions, so I'll usually try to phrase it like that instead. i.e:
Me: Are you hungry?
Class: Noooo! Not hungry!
Basically, it's impossible to get them to come up with their own answers to things in a group setting, but I've found other ways to get them to use vocabulary and understand concepts. Over time, some of the more clever kids have learned to understand questions, and, if I'm lucky, the rest of the class will repeat after them. I've learned to teach them things in ways they find interesting, like coming up to the front and repeating words after me (they love this to no end) or running off to find things like red chairs or yellow and green pencils or two erasers. Asking "where is the blue chair?" gets far better results than asking "what color is this chair?". Producing is difficult - while they're certainly producing in their own language, this is their first exposure to immersive foreign language learning so it's taking them a bit to produce. I've learned so much in such a short amount of time, which makes me sure that a more experienced teacher would have done a lot more, a lot better, a lot faster, but I think I've done okay for being a novice, and only teaching each class twice a week over the past 2 1/2 months.
On a good day, I feel like they've learned a lot and are developing a good accent and a strong foundation. On a bad day, they don't listen at all and I don't have a chance of being able to teach them conversation. Discipline is impossible, because I don't speak Thai, but they often run up and hand me the whipping stick so that I can hit them, which I thank them for and promptly set down. Overall they're really adorable, and their love for me really makes my day. I love singing and dancing with them and seeing them progress and actually care to learn. As I said at the beginning: there is no average day in kindergarten.
____________
Teaching high school in the afternoon has been a different story. Barring tales of stress and frustration and drama and heartache, suffice it to say that this job has been an exercise for Ariel and I in letting go and caring less. This is difficult for people like us: passionate, stubborn, analyzers, problem-solvers, perfectionists. Our passion is something we take pride in and begrudge having to stifle, but I suppose part of growing up is knowing when and how to do so. Caring less feels like a waste; a disservice to ourselves and our students, but caring as much as we tend to bucks the system in a way that tends to give way to arrogance. It's difficult to not see the huge holes in this education system compared to our own ideals. It's difficult to see these students let down; to see how little faith their teachers have in them and their future. It's difficult to care so much in a system that cares so little, and it's difficult to understand why that is. It's always difficult to see how you may not be "right" about something on the whole just because the pieces are, objectively, better. Yes, these kids should have had a better grounding in English. They shouldn't be wasting lessons reading passages that are far far far beyond their comprehension level. They should be working from the ground up to become comfortable in basic grammar if they are to have any hope of speaking English. But they didn't, and they are, and they're not. It is too late for these kids. The system has failed them, and they're not going to learn English in this school. And that's how it is, and perhaps that's alright. Perhaps that's what makes Thais the way they are and Thailand the way it is - a people and a place we love. It's not "right" for us to want to change that. The best we can provide is the "skill" we were hired for - our accent. We can try to make these kids speak English poorly in a way that can be better understood. So suppress our passion; suppress our frustration; suppress our caring; suppress our simplistic ideas of what is "better" and our hopes for what could be. I suppose that is part of growing up, though I balk against it. Understanding what you can and cannot change and making sure that what is "right" is actually better, even when what is "better" seems so right.
Teaching English without any knowledge of Thai to rooms full of 25 monolingual 3-5 year olds certainly seemed daunting 3 months ago, but I've managed to figure out a sort of system. In a way, it's nice to not have a common language - the kids are forced to try to make sense of what I'm saying, and I've been learning a little Thai along the way.
Here's what I feel like I've managed to "solidly" teach them:
Greetings (Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night)
Days of the week and number of days in a week
How are you? (angry, sad, hungry, tired, scared, happy)
How's the weather? (cloudy, sunny, rainy, windy, snowy)
Shapes (Circle, square, triangle, rectangle)
What color is this? (blue, green, yellow, red, orange, pink, purple)
How many?
Counting 1-20
Where is the...? (door, chair, table, eraser, marker, pencil, window, teacher, student)
Letters A-R and how to do things like draw a line from M to a picture of a mouse
2 vocab words for each alphabet letter
Body parts (head, shoulders, knees, toes, eyes, ears, nose, mouth)
Action words (Sit down, stand up, come here, clap, count, color, write, circle, draw a line)
Quiet, loud, fast, slow, ready, finished, good, big, small
Boy, girl
Please, thank you, you're welcome
Attempted:
Meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner)
Various animals
More obscure action words (jump, turn around, run, walk)
What is your name? (As important as this is, it was impossible for them to understand this concept without me being able to speak Thai and without already knowing their names. More on this later)
"Solid" means that most of them know these words/concepts or, after a little prodding, can remember them again quite quickly. We practice them daily or I try to at least use them in my own speech to keep it in the kids' minds. "Attempted" means I sometimes dedicated large parts of my lessons to these things, but it's been too difficult to maintain practice. It's hard to go over 10 different animals every day - there's not enough time and it won't keep their attention. As a general rule, it's impossible to teach them things I can't easily bring into use every day. For instance, I can ask them how are you, how's the weather, what day is it, etc at the beginning of every class. I can make it a point to incorporate concepts like "where" and "how many" in my daily speech. Every day I practice pleasantries by having them say please and thank you when receiving their workbooks. But anything else is difficult to practice every day and therefore difficult to retain. It's useless to teach them vocab that can't be found in the classroom. It's impossible to teach them concepts that can't get them moving or touching things. The single hardest, unexpected difficulty in teaching ESL to kindergartners (other than having zero resources) has been their inability to understand the concept of questions (although this problem extends to the higher grades as well!). It's unbelievably difficult to get them to understand the difference between when I want them to repeat after me for practice and when I want them to answer a question and not repeat it. No matter of hand gestures will help me. I discovered this during the first and second lesson, when I decided to teach them what I naively thought would be the most useful and easy concepts: how are you, and what is your name. I could get them to repeat these phrases until they were blue in the face, but there was no chance of getting them to treat it like a question. Here's how this dialogue usually went.
Me: How are you?
Class: How are you?
Me: Me? I'm happy. How are you?
Class: Me? I'm happy. How are you?
Me: Are you...hungry?
Class: Are you hungry?
Me: Yes? You are hungry?
Class: Yes? You are hungry?
*I forgot to mention that I first taught this lesson with a little hand puppet. I repeated the conversation with the puppet and tried to have the kids converse with the puppet, but to no avail. Shrug. At least they loved the hand puppet.
After employing every possible hand gesture etc etc I decided to give up on them ever quite being able to answer this. The best I could do was to get them to remember the vocabulary, and as time went on I've found ways to sort of get around these problems. They've become better at understanding the concept of yes/no questions, so I'll usually try to phrase it like that instead. i.e:
Me: Are you hungry?
Class: Noooo! Not hungry!
Basically, it's impossible to get them to come up with their own answers to things in a group setting, but I've found other ways to get them to use vocabulary and understand concepts. Over time, some of the more clever kids have learned to understand questions, and, if I'm lucky, the rest of the class will repeat after them. I've learned to teach them things in ways they find interesting, like coming up to the front and repeating words after me (they love this to no end) or running off to find things like red chairs or yellow and green pencils or two erasers. Asking "where is the blue chair?" gets far better results than asking "what color is this chair?". Producing is difficult - while they're certainly producing in their own language, this is their first exposure to immersive foreign language learning so it's taking them a bit to produce. I've learned so much in such a short amount of time, which makes me sure that a more experienced teacher would have done a lot more, a lot better, a lot faster, but I think I've done okay for being a novice, and only teaching each class twice a week over the past 2 1/2 months.
On a good day, I feel like they've learned a lot and are developing a good accent and a strong foundation. On a bad day, they don't listen at all and I don't have a chance of being able to teach them conversation. Discipline is impossible, because I don't speak Thai, but they often run up and hand me the whipping stick so that I can hit them, which I thank them for and promptly set down. Overall they're really adorable, and their love for me really makes my day. I love singing and dancing with them and seeing them progress and actually care to learn. As I said at the beginning: there is no average day in kindergarten.
____________
Teaching high school in the afternoon has been a different story. Barring tales of stress and frustration and drama and heartache, suffice it to say that this job has been an exercise for Ariel and I in letting go and caring less. This is difficult for people like us: passionate, stubborn, analyzers, problem-solvers, perfectionists. Our passion is something we take pride in and begrudge having to stifle, but I suppose part of growing up is knowing when and how to do so. Caring less feels like a waste; a disservice to ourselves and our students, but caring as much as we tend to bucks the system in a way that tends to give way to arrogance. It's difficult to not see the huge holes in this education system compared to our own ideals. It's difficult to see these students let down; to see how little faith their teachers have in them and their future. It's difficult to care so much in a system that cares so little, and it's difficult to understand why that is. It's always difficult to see how you may not be "right" about something on the whole just because the pieces are, objectively, better. Yes, these kids should have had a better grounding in English. They shouldn't be wasting lessons reading passages that are far far far beyond their comprehension level. They should be working from the ground up to become comfortable in basic grammar if they are to have any hope of speaking English. But they didn't, and they are, and they're not. It is too late for these kids. The system has failed them, and they're not going to learn English in this school. And that's how it is, and perhaps that's alright. Perhaps that's what makes Thais the way they are and Thailand the way it is - a people and a place we love. It's not "right" for us to want to change that. The best we can provide is the "skill" we were hired for - our accent. We can try to make these kids speak English poorly in a way that can be better understood. So suppress our passion; suppress our frustration; suppress our caring; suppress our simplistic ideas of what is "better" and our hopes for what could be. I suppose that is part of growing up, though I balk against it. Understanding what you can and cannot change and making sure that what is "right" is actually better, even when what is "better" seems so right.
