Thursday, April 8

I spent most of yesterday doing job interview prep. I emailed the agency in the morning, letting them know I was interested in the Primary School English Teacher position, and they got back to me quickly, asking if I could go to the school the following day (today—Thursday) and give a 30 minute teaching demonstration using a PowerPoint presentation.

I agreed, and spent the next two hours or so putting something together. I knew it was a bit of a risk creating the demonstration before getting more details from the agency, since it was possible the school would ask for something more specific, but I was hoping to get my work done in the first part of the day (what a joke that turned out to be!).

I wanted to do something simpler than the lesson plan I’d created for the agency interview (on the first conditional), so I created a lesson about making comparisons in English (big/bigger, beautiful/more beautiful, good/better). It didn’t take me that long to come up with ideas for activities and how to structure the lesson, but the PowerPoint took ages. Not that is was complicated—just time consuming. I had to find free images that were of good enough quality to be blown up on a projector screen, and every image had to be cropped and resized. The font had to be clear and consistent and I had to have clear notes for myself on what I wanted to say with each slide, etc, etc. Just fussy, slow work. 

After I finished a good working draft, Roman and I went back to Silom. I wanted to buy a few things in their fancy, Western-style shops: nail polish and nail polish remover to touch up my pedicure, sunscreen, and breakfast fixings at the big supermarket. It took a little searching (nail polish is weirdly hard to find here) but I eventually found everything on my list, plus a yoga mat!

We also headed back to the hidden alleys near our first Airbnb, and wandered past the busy stalls selling hot food, fruit, little cakes, iced coffee and tea, clothes, shoes, and household goods.

Roman picked up some fried dumplings for lunch, and I got pad see ew.

I also had a charcoal doughnut (Roman's was plain glazed—more delicious but less striking)

After lunch, I checked my phone and saw that the agency had gotten back to me—the school wanted me to prepare two lesson plans on the subjects provided. Augh!

I mean, I knew the lesson prep I did in the morning could have been a waste of time, but it was still frustrating to discover it was in fact a waste of time. And that I had a lot more work to do. 

And, oh man, did it take ages to do the lesson planning. 

I was supposed to create two half hour lesson plans, one on Geography and one on “English.” They asked me to base 20 minutes of the lessons on my prepared PowerPoints. The last 10 minutes could be devoted to worksheets. 

The school has provided the worksheets, copied from a book, but there was no other indication of what the bulk of the lesson was supposed to be about. So I worked backwards from the worksheets as best I could. 

The Geography lesson was about using maps, and I created a PowerPoint about map symbols, legends, compasses, and scales, using a map of Oregon as my most frequent example. 

The English lesson was not an English lesson at all (at least, it didn't seem like one to me), but was called A Long Time Ago and had material about humans in “prehistoric times.” The answers to the worksheets indicated that these people wore fur and hunted and lived in caves. I really didn’t feel like "prehistoric times" was a specific enough term for a classroom lesson, so I looked up when people were, you know, cave-dwelling and fur-wearing and spear-throwing and decided to make a presentation about the Stone Age. 

God, it took so long. Again, much of the time was spent just formatting the damn PowerPoints. Also, my computer uses Linux and when I re-saved the files as actual PowerPoints, a bunch of formatting got screwed up so I had to do a chunk of my work all over again. 

In the background of all this was a faint feeling of ridiculousness. I don’t know anything about maps or the Stone Age. Let alone pedagogy! How on earth do I— does anyone—think I am equipped to teach this?

My only real qualification is being a native English speaker. And I guess not blowing the teaching demonstration!

I took a break in the evening to find some dinner with Roman.

Blurry Roman with night-blooming flowers

We went to our new favorite street food spot in Sathorn, which was busy with people ordering and eating som tam, fried chicken, soups, and whole grilled tilapia from the different carts, some sitting in the light of lanterns drinking beer or liquor with their meals.

Ooh, lanterns

Dinner

Alligator painting on our dinner cart

I started work again around 8pm that evening, determined to finish in an hour or so. It all felt a little ridiculous. I had located the school on a map some time in the afternoon, and realized—in spite of what the agency had said—that it was not near a metro or BTS stop. To get there using public transportation, I’d have to take a metro, then a bus, and then walk—for a total of about 30 minutes walking. In the morning, I figured I’d take a motorcycle Grab from the metro, but it really wasn’t a sustainable daily commute. 

And sometime during the day, I’d also gotten an email from a school I was more interested in working for (the one I sent the video to), who wanted to interview me on Thursday too. 

So I was spending a huge amount of time preparing for a job I didn’t really want. 

I tried to look at it as free practice—practice preparing and then doing a lesson plan, practice interviewing for a job in Thailand. 

When I went back to complete my Stone Age PowerPoint, I realized the slides would probably only take up about five minutes of class time. It was now nearing 9pm and I was pretty close to being done. 

I cut and paste and bunch of relevant Stone Age info from the internet into my lecture notes, got the PowerPoints formatted as good as I could in the time remaining, and called it a night. 

It’s kind of funny, I probably spent 5? 6? hours on those two PowerPoints and they weren’t even all that great. I mean, I really half assed it at the end there, and it still took an enormous amount of time. I have so much renewed respect for teachers. Man. 

I slept poorly, and woke up early. 

I took the metro to Phanon Yothin, and then wandered outside, wondering if I should order a Grab. There was a small group of people in orange vests on motorcycles and I hesitated briefly, not sure if they were in fact motorcycle taxis, which seemed like such a basic thing to not know about a city. But as I watched, a guy approached one of the drivers and then got on his bike, so I followed his lead. 

It took a while, and several conversations with several drivers who didn't understand where I wanted to go, before a driver agreed to take me to the school. He said it would be 150 baht, which I knew was overpriced but, well, I had to get to the interview and wasn’t going to haggle. He mounted my phone in place of his phone on the handlebars and I situated myself on the back of his bike, and we were off.

It was a fun ride; if a little nerve wracking. We went onto the highway, pretty fast, and me in no helmet (sorry, parents!), grabbing hold to the back of the seat. 

But I got to the school early, in time to review my materials, comb my hair, and put a cardigan on over my tattoos.

Flowers outside the school

The school

I met another foreigner—a Brit called David—also from the agency, also interviewing, in the waiting room. We filled out some paperwork and then were led into two different classrooms. 

The HR person was on vacation, and so our interviewers were two Americans in their 40s and 60s, respectively. They were very relaxed and informal—one sat in the back of the classroom for my first lesson, while the other sat in the back of David's classroom for his first lesson, and then they switched. 

I got off to a ROCKY start. I had sent the agency my PowerPoint and had emailed on of the school employees my handouts when I arrived, but nothing got printed or set up—there was just a computer connected to the projector.

And oh my god I couldn’t log in to my Gmail account because it’s set up to verify a login from a new computer on my no longer functional US phone number!

I spent a few minutes awkwardly trying to login while the class watched and waited. I had a definite moment of—maybe this won’t work? Maybe I’ll just have to call it quits and walk out of this interview?

And then the interviewer gave me his email address and I sent him the PowerPoint, and he logged on and opened up the documents I needed.

It was a hiccup, but it wasn’t that big of a deal, really. I didn’t feel like I was being tested or, like, docked for not doing things perfectly. My sense is that things aren’t terribly rigid here. To make a big generalization. 

The first class was on the Stone Age and it went OK. The "students" were a bunch of young Thai teachers and they clearly did not speak much English—I quickly realized that the lesson I had planned used far too complex language for this specific group. 

But I did my best, and when we did the worksheets at the end (which someone had eventually brought to me) they got a lot more talkative and relaxed. 

Which made the next lesson a lot more smooth. The subject was easier to understand and the "students" were much more interactive—a little rowdy, even! 

The Americans let me know when to wrap it up but, again, it wasn’t super formal, like: you have four minutes remaining or anything. 

I waited while they finishing interviewing David, and then I interviewed with them both. 

It was very relaxed—I mean, they were two other teachers, not my would-be bosses, and they were pretty upfront about Thai teaching culture and stuff (one of them told me to imagine American schools in the 1950s. They expect teachers to be professionals and to be good role models). 

I thought it went well, overall. I felt surprisingly comfortable in front of the class, though I will have to work on getting actual kids to pay attention—sometimes I struggled to get the adults to stop talking to each other! It wasn’t disrespectful or anything—but like, at one moment, they just really wanted to get their worksheets done and kept asking me questions about the answers, even as I was trying to finish the lesson and take their worksheets away. 

Anyway, the main drawback of the place is the location. Train plus taxi? Seems expensive and a pain. 

But one of the most instructive things was the taxi ride after! David waited around so we could share a cab to the Metro/BTS, and he spouted off about Thai schools and culture, most of which was actually pretty helpful. 

He told me that I’d have no problem finding a job, with a BA and a TEFL and because I’m "a girl." He said dye your hair blonde and they’ll be throwing jobs at you. He added, these are their priorities. This is why Thais don’t speak better English. 

I mean, kinda weird. But he also gave me some good tips on looking for a condo. And it was just helpful to talk to someone who’s been here more than a week!

I got home around 12:15 and only had about 45 minutes until I had to head out to my afternoon interview. I had just enough time to change, prep for the interview a little, and have a quick lunch of bao and unripe mango with fermented shrimp paste (the thing you get when you want to pick up something fresh to go with your bao).

I took the metro and then the BTS to my afternoon. I spent hours of the day on trains, but I actually wrote most of this blog on my phone while I was waiting or writing. That's probably why it's so long and detailed (and I wrote "PowerPoint the way I did—my phone's autocorrect).

When I arrived at the school, I filled out the interview form. Both forms I filled out today asked for the names, ages, and occupations of my parents, the number of female and male siblings I have, my race, and my religion. This form also asked for my blood type, my height and weight, and whether I have any scars. 

Uh, maybe it’s just a standard form? Still. 

The interview was great, though! It was with the Director of Studies, a Brit named Scot. I talked a bit about myself and my background—past jobs, teaching experience, why I moved to Thailand. He didn’t ask any kind of trick questions—it felt very supportive and straightforward. 

And then he talked a lot about the program and their approach. And, man, I was pretty impressed. Unlike most every other program I’ve researched, this one provide a ton of training and support for teachers. They provide all the lesson plans, and the classes are really focused on getting the kids doing activities—playing games, and getting up and talking. They’re all about creating a supportive safe environment. It was pretty cool.

After that I headed home to chill for just a bit and work on this blog. 

In the evening, we walked to a nearby neighborhood where we'd gotten street food the last time we were here. Roman got a bowl of khao soi, and I got a hard-to-photograph shrimp pancakes.

We went for a short wander around the neighborhood, and came upon Chinese eateries selling Peking duck, hidden street food courtyards, and narrow alleys that lead to lots of fruit stalls, a small wet market selling produce and meat, and lots of inexpensive little sidewalk shops.

I have to remind myself—and remember to remind anyone who comes to Bangkok for the first time and finds it to be nothing but shopping malls and apartment complexes, concrete and glass—just look a little deeper.