Look Mom, I'm All Grown Up Now!

Monday through Friday I'm up by seven, by far the earliest I've had to wake up since high school. I shower, put on slacks, dress shoes and a button-down -- yellow on Mondays, for the Thai King, Tuesday, pink, for the Princess, and Wednesday, baby blue, for the queen -- optional in our school, but why not? and it seems to tickle the Thai teachers. Thursday and Friday I wing it. My roommate and coworker, Jamie, and I are the first ones in the office, and we get right to work on lesson plans, or grading, before morning assembly begins. One by one, our colleagues come in, and we wai to each of them (hands pressed together in a lotus -- at a different level in front of the face, depending on the age and position of the person -- and a small bow).
This is my life, during the week anyway. I'm living in Trat, Thailand, capital city of the province by the same name, with the Gulf of Thailand to the south, and Cambodia 40 km west. It wasn't long ago I was unemployed, drinking too much bad bourbon and shit beer, and counting down the days until my arrival in Asia. I knew little about Thailand, and less about teaching. A month later (plus the half day earlier that the sun rises), I'm here. Oh what a difference a few weeks can make.

I live in a really nice, large house, in a middle class neighborhood at the edge of town. For the first time in my life, I own my own transportation -- a motorbike, registered in my name. It's fast, shiny nearly new, and it makes point A to point B a delightful experience. I have part of the responsibly for the education and welfare of hundreds of children in my hands. I volunteer to work occasional Saturday English competitions, or to tutor students for spelling bees and such. I'm known and recognized enough in what is really just a small town (I sort of stand out) to get nods, smiles and hellos everywhere I go. I impress people by eating spicy food, and earn bonus points for saying, in Thai, that I love it. I volunteered to be director and speech coach for a production of a scene from Shakespeare's Richard III -- and my six thespians -- students aged 13-15 -- shone on stage (actually, just in a classroom). I am invited to Sunday luncheons at the local temple where I know how to properly show respect to the Buddhist monks, and in fragments of Thai and English, I chat with and flatter the respectable women dressed in their Sunday best, and always give the answer they want when they ask my opinion of the Thai King, or Thaksin, the disgraced former Prime Minister. I blush obligingly but humbly at their jokes of setting me up with daughters.

It would be going too far to call me a model citizen, or a pillar of my community, but you really wouldn't be so far from the mark either. I really like it here. I like my routine, I like my colleagues, and most of all I like my students. It is certainly challenging. Classes typically are 40-50 students. Most of them I see once a week but I'm lucky enough to have three smaller groups that I teach three times a week. The school is government-run, and the province's flagship school so it is well-funded. It is nominally Buddhist, but I don't think there are religion classes, and there is a scattering of Christian and Muslim students. It is a secondary school, six class levels from 13-18 years old, and it is almost all girls. Of the nearly 500 students I see a week, nine are boys.
The image of me, standing in front of 48 loud teenage girls, trying to bridge a culture and a language that are a world away from my own, might be hard for some people to imagine. It might inspire a belief in karma in some of my former teachers. But I really do quite like it. It is not perfect. It can be very frustrating. If my students decide they would rather talk the whole lesson, there's not a lot of recourse for me to take. Students never fail here. My level six students have a bad case of senioritis, and in some classes only a quarter show up at all. And everything is based around rote learning which I find very ineffective. There are major communication problems; I find out that a class is canceled (which happens often) only after no students show up. But all things considered, it could be a lot worse. There is a phrase in Thai, mai pen lai, something like 'no problem' or 'it doesn't matter', and I embrace it, live it, like a philosophy. I'm not going to single-handedly change the culture within the school, or for that matter, in Thailand, so I just go with the flow. Not only do I accept it, I revel in it. Suppressing my natural curiosity and dislike of surprise, I find enjoyment in haphazard scheduling and the lack of any explanation about anything, ever. When school sport day rolled around, I expected it to be just that -- sports -- something like field day at an American school. So when I saw the parade winding through town, I was bewildered. Thailand is pretty conservative, the younger students in the school can't have hair past their shoulders. They all wear shin-length skirts, and none are allowed makeup. So, when I showed up to find these same students in the sport day parade, dressed like Lincoln Park trixies out on Halloween night, I was somewhat surprised. But as I said, I've come to accept it. I can sit at a table, eight people around me, obviously continuing to talk about me after we've exchanged pleasantries, and I've exhausted my limited Thai and they their English, and this can go on for 15 minutes. I just sit there with a wide smile on my face. It's not forced. I've come to find some strange enjoyment or bemusement in all of this. With a heavy dose of serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, I find teaching here to be a tremendously rewarding undertaking.

I really do like most of my students, and excepting one or two hyperactive classes, I think I manage the classroom pretty well. Once in a while I leave class feeling unbelievably frustrated, but I feel lucky that it's usually not the students that make me feel that way. Sometimes they leave me feeling annoyed, but I get over that quickly. It is when I know my lesson didn't get through to them, and I know it was my fault, that I beat myself up. But mostly I leave a classroom with a feeling of satisfaction, knowing that what I taught got through to the students. Occasionally a lesson goes so well it puts me in a good mood for the whole day. And when the students really start pushing my buttons, I just think back to what I could be like as a student, and I quickly become a very forgiving teacher. And I know I would have been even worse if I had a teacher who couldn't understand a word I said.

As far as Ben, the morally upright, good citizen, well, if only they knew. Half an hour on my bike from Trat, the ferry leaves for Koh Chang, my weekend island paradise. From the end of the day on Friday, until I return on Sunday night, I take a pagan embrace of pure hedonism. It is stunning there. The calm, warm sea laps at a thin strip of white sand, a few palm trees leaning out over it, and then the green jungle rises vertically into mountains. It's tough to pull yourself away from the beach, but someday I intend to do some jungle trekking. Maybe some fishing and kayaking too. Sometimes I scrape up enough motivation to cruise the mountain roads, and the views make for a stunning motorbike ride. I get a nice local's discount for diving the coral reefs in the crystal clear waters that, looking down from the boat, seem an almost poisonous shade of aquamarine. It's a weekly struggle to pull myself away from it all, and return to my routine. But on Monday morning, still tired from too much sun and too many cocktails on the beach, when I see my students smile and wai to me, it's really not so bad to be back in Trat.