Learning Thai

Claire has completed her first three-day week at school - and enjoyed it very much. Despite the early mornings and daily battle with heavy traffic she has gotten off to a terrific start. She comes home excited every day and is making good progress already with learning a few Thai letters and adjusting to the classroom routine. I've been able to spend parts of every day in her classroom, but other than one episode involving a wild running game that she didn't understand she hasn't needed me at all. She seemed glad for a chance to sleep in this morning, but she's already asking about when she can go back.

Every morning all of the kids line up to sing/shout the national anthem. They also practice standing at attention and listen to one of the teachers give some sort of instruction.

Every day the class sits on the floor in front of the board and works on memorizing and drawing the Thai alphabet, numbers, etc. The teacher has involved Claire in this from the very first day and I've been amazed at how willing Claire is to jump right in and participate to the best of her ability.

Finally, here's a video of this teaching time. The teacher is helping Claire write a couple of characters on the board while the rest of the class shows varying degrees of interest.

During the days that Claire is at school I've been helping the head English teacher with some of his classes (sometimes more crowd control than teaching). Every evening this week I've also had private English classes - Monday, Wednesday and Friday with two little girls and Tuesday and Thursday with 7 employees of a local steering wheel factory who want to learn basic telephone English. On the weekends I also tutor one man and three siblings. It's been busy - but after several weeks of unstructured time it's been good to get my mind off of visa issues!

-Tom